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G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 



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EMERSON 



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Ralph IValdo Emerson. 

From the drawii^lff^ George y. Tohin. 

ELISABETH 
LVTMER^ 

ILLVSTi^ATED 




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EMERSON 



POET 



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THINKER 




BY 

ELISABETH 

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THE FCNICKERBOCKLK .PRE^S 



KEWYORJC^ LONDON 




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LIBRAKYcf CONGRESS 
Two Copies Koceiveti 

NOV 7 jyuH 

CLASS A Xac, No; 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1904 

BY 

G, ri. PUTNAM'S SONS 



Published, November, 1004 



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To 
MY FATHER 



PREFACE. 

EMERSON'S influence upon American thought 
has become so pervasive ; so many books 
embodying the modern spirit are either the 
direct or the indirect result of his attitude tov/ard 
things of the mind, that it seems worth while to 
emphasise his individual message once more, even 
at the risk of repeating much that has been said with 
more authority. The readers of the present genera- 
tion hardly can turn many of his pages without sur- 
prise that he so indubitably belongs to them ; that 
he is so freshly inspiring after half a century of 
rapidly changing manners and customs. His firm 
morality and the gracious art with which he has 
made morality beautiful are as valuable to-day as 
when his presence in the world gave a personal in- 
terest to his writings. 

''What is the hardest task in the world? To 
think," he somewhere says, and certainly he puts 
his critic to the test ; his accomplishment, ap- 
parently so simple, having a most complicated re- 
lation to his mind and temperament. But until 
humanity has changed its elements he will be an 



111 



iv preface. 

object of consideration with those interested in the 
sources of mental and moral influences ; and my in- 
adequate study of him will perhaps provoke one 
more enlightening. I have made such use as 1 have 
required of preceding accounts of him, and 1 wish to 
express my gratitude to Dr. Edward Emerson and to 
Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company for their kind 
permission to make use of extracts from Emerson's 
works. 

Elisabeth Luther Gary. 

Brooklyn, October 3d, 1904. 




CONTENTS. 








CHAPTER PAGE 


I. — Early Years i 


II. — Preparation .... 






18 


III. — Religion .... 






34 


IV.— Nature .... 






. 57 


V. — Carlyle 






. 76 


VI.— ''Man, the Reformer" 






. 93 


VII.— The Dial 






112 


VIII. — The Dial {Continued) . 






. 138 


IX.— Emerson Abroad . 






. 155 


X.— Representative Men . • 






. 183 


XI. — Poems .... 






. 205 


XII. — The Closing Years 






. 221 


XIII.— The French Estimate . 






. 234 


Appendix 






265 


Index 






281 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Ralph Waldo Emerson . . Frontispiece 

From the drawing by George T. Tohin. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

From a photograph taken in 184J. 

The Approach to Emerson's Home . 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

After an engraving by Schoff of the original drawing by 

S. IV. Rowse, in the possession ofC. E. Norton, Esq. 

By permission of Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

From the portrait by Scott. In Concord Public Library. 

Thomas Carlyle 

From an engraving by G. IV. Smith . 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Bradford, and 
William H, Furness 

From a photograph by Gutekunst, Philadelphia, iSyy. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . . 

From a photograph. 

Frank B. Sanborn 

From a photograph by H. G. Smith, Boston 



Page 



12 



24 

36 



Bronson Alcott . 



50 

16 

90 
102 

no 

122 



From a photograph. 
vii 



viii miuetratione. 

Page 

Henry D. Thoreau 126 

From a steel engraving. 

yiew of Emerson s Home 140 

From a photograph by A. Hosmer. 

Margaret Fuller 144 

From a photograph by Lawrence 

Ralph IValdo Emerson 160 

From a photograph by H. G. Smith, Boston. 

Emerson's Study at Concord .... ij2 

From a photograph by A. Hosmer. 

Ralph IValdo Emerson 792 

From the drawing by 5. IV. Rowse, by permission of Messrs. Curtis 

& Cameron and Messrs. Small, Maynard, & Co. 

Copyright, ipoi. 

Herman Grimm 2^4 

From a steel engraving. 

Bust of Emerson 2^0 

By Daniel Chester French. By permission of The Century Co. 

Ralph IValdo Emerson 260 

From the etching by Aug. IVill. 

Emerson's Crave at Concord .... 272 

From a photograph by Alfred Hosmer. 




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CHAPTER I. 
EARLY YEARS. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born in Bos- 
ton, Massachusetts, in the old parish house 
of the First Church, on Summer Street, on 
the twenty-fifth of May, 1803, and died in Concord, 
seventy-nine years later, on the twenty-seventh of 
April, 1882. His father, the Rev. William Emerson, 
was a clergyman of social tastes, with a melo- 
dious voice, a scholarly style, and a buoyant 
disposition. Not from him certainly did Emerson 
derive his ideal of a sacred individuality to be nur- 
tured in solitude. If we delve the family to the root, 
we find the grandfather and great-grandfather also 
clergymen; then by skipping one generation we come 
again upon the ministerial office, while scattered 
along collateral lines are many prophets of the soul. 
For more than two centuries the ministry claimed 
one or more of the Emersons. ''The clergy are as 
alike as peas," writes the offspring of this clerical 
race, with a fine independence, *' I cannot tell them 
apart! " One of the great-grandfathers prayed every 



2 IRalpb Malbo fimereon* 

night that none of his descendants might ever be rich, 
and Emerson's worldly condition must sufficiently 
have pleased the austere ghost of that ancestor, for 
his poverty in boyhood was not of the bland, com- 
parative nature, but positive and exacting. 

He and his four brothers were all under ten years 
of age when his father died. His mother, a gracious 
type of woman with sweet, dark eyes and a pleasant 
voice, was left with a small income and the irrefraga- 
ble New England ambition toward an education for 
her sons. This could be gained only by hard labour 
on the part of the elders, and no little assistance from 
the boys themselves. At the age of nine Emerson 
sent to his aunt a chronicle of one day's occupations, 
and they left but a small amount of time for mere 
boyish sport. ''We retire to bed at different times," 
the young chronicler concludes, with the majesty of 
style common to his age ; *M go at a little after eight, 
and retire to my private devotions, and then close 
my eyes in sleep, and there ends the toils of the 
day."^ 

His aunt writes of their '* trials by boarders," and 
we hear of other trials demanding an endurance 
somewhat more heroic, a day without food for ex- 
ample, and a sparsity of warm clothing for the bleak 
New England winters. It would be easy, however, 
to make too much of these inconveniences; they 
were no greater than fell to the lot of many a clergy- 
man's family at that unluxurious period, and Emer- 

' ^ Memoir of Ralph IValdo Emerson. By James Elliot Cabot. 



Barl^ l?ear0. 3 

son in after-life paid faithful homage to his old nurse 
Poverty. '* Honour to the house where they are 
simple to the verge of hardship," he wrote, and de- 
scribed the sons of the poor thus eloquently: ''What 
is the hoop that holds them staunch? It is the iron 
band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which, 
excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which 
make other boys too early old, has directed their 
activity in safe and right channels, and made them, 
despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beauti- 
ful, and the good. Ah! shortsighted students of 
books, of Nature, and of man! too happy, could they 
know their advantages. They pine for freedom from 
that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, 
for rides, for the theatre, and premature freedom and 
dissipation, which others possess. Woe to them if 
their wishes were crowned! The angels that dwell 
with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their 
youthful brows, are Toil, and Want, and Truth, and 
Mutual Faith." ^ 

Elsewhere he says that *' a tender boy who wears 
his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure 
the coveted place in college, and the right in the 
library, is educated to some purpose." He speaks 
from experience. Whatever was left out frop" the 
little household, study was never even pushed aside 
to make room for immediate material needs, and 
Emerson was brought up to think no sacrifice ex- 
treme that procured the opportunity of learning. 

' Society and Solitude. 



4 IRalpb MaIJ)o lemereon. 

He was sent to school before he was three, and it 
was made a matter for note that he read but poorly 
at that ripe age. His moral sense also failed pre- 
maturely to appear. From writing-school he de- 
liberately and continuously played truant, although 
at home his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, faithfully 
indicated to him high standards of conduct. At ten 
he was in l/irgil, but, according to his own account, 
''rather inclined to play than read" when out of 
school, and looking back to this time his old friend 
and schoolfellow. Dr. Furness thanked Heaven that 
he had no talent for anything, ''nothing but pure 
genius, which talents would have overlaid." 

At fourteen he was ready for Harvard, and passed 
a good entrance examination. This argued no un- 
usual precocity, as the college was then more a boy's 
school than a man's university. Lowell, seventeen 
years later, entered at fifteen, and Longfellow was not 
yet so old when he entered Bowdoin, Harvard's am- 
bitious godchild. One of Emerson's aunts is recorded 
as much regretting the choice of Harvard for her 
nephew's Alma Mater, her orthodox mind turning in 
preference to Brown University. But if tradition has 
any power in itself for good. Harvard was the only 
place for an Emerson, fifty-six members of the family 
already having been graduated there. In one way 
and another he managed to cover most of the heavier 
expenses of the college course without making seri- 
ous demands upon the family resources. He was 
waiter at Commons, which gave him the right to 



learli? 15ear6. 5 

three-fourths of the cost of his board ; he was the 
'' president's Freshman " (the messenger of the presi- 
dent to summon delinquents, and to announce to the 
students the decisions of the faculty), and had his 
lodging free in the president's house. He also was 
beneficiary of certain scholarship funds. Although 
he never could recognise that his college experience 
greatly benefited him, he could praise New England 
for deciding the destiny of the country in allowing 
the poor man to '' put his hand into the pocket of the 
rich, and say. You shall educate me, not as you will, 
but as 1 will: not alone in the elements, but, by 
further provision, in the languages, in sciences, in 
the useful and in elegant arts."^ 

As a student, in the ordinary acceptation of the 
term, he seems not to have been either a great suc- 
cess or a failure. In mathematics he records himself 
a hopeless dunce. During his Freshman period he 
boldly announced to his elder brother his scepticism 
on the subject of ''Mathematics and Greek." It 
was not necessary, he thought, to understand them 
thoroughly in order to be a good, useful, or even 
great man. His final standing was a little above the 
middle of his class in college rank. Many lifelong 
tendencies and habits reveal themselves in his early 
attitude toward his studies. Constantly rambling off 
from such dry terrors as analytical geometry to the 
pleasant pastures of Chaucer and Montaigne, Plu- 
tarch and Plato, he sturdily recommended this system 

' Essay on Education. 



6 IRalpb MaI&o lemereon* 

in his mature writings. To teachers he dictates: 'M 
believe that our own experience instructs us that the 
secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is 
not for you to choose what he shall know, what he 
shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only 
holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering 
and thwarting and too much governing he may be 
hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Re- 
spect the child. Wait and see the new product of 
Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. 
Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. 
Trespass not on his solitude."^ 

Nothing could come nearer to the general principles 
of modern education than this independent doctrine 
of which in those days there were few exponents, 
and as teacher to himself he carried it out to the last 
article. His intellectual effort was all on the line of 
his natural inclination. He would ''as soon swim 
the Charles River to get from Cambridge to Boston " 
as read a book in a difficult foreign tongue when a 
translation could be had. To the end of his days he 
kept the browsing habit of his youth, clipping off the 
sweet perfection of many authors, but seldom search- 
ing them profoundly for their inner meaning. In his 
essay on Experience he depicts the restless temper of 
his mind, so curiously contrasting with his moral 
steadiness. ''Our love of the real draws us to per- 
manence, but health of body consists in circulation, 
and sanity of mind in variety or facility of associa- 

' Essay on Education. 



tion. We need change of objects. Dedication to 
one thought is quickly odious. We house with the 
insane and must humour them ; then conversation 
dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne 
that I thought 1 should not need any other book ; be- 
fore that, in Shakespeare; then in Plutarch; then in 
Plotinus; at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; 
even in Bettine; but now 1 turn the pages of either of 
them languidly, whilst still I cherish their genius." 

Doubtless if in college or later he had applied himself 
diligently to conquer this desultoriness of interest, 
his so-called ''philosophy" would have gained in 
order and logical construction, but almost inevitably 
it would have been limited to a much smaller audi- 
ence. Emerson's theories and views come hot from 
his own experience. He generalises himself and 
states his generalisations in positive terms, without 
challenging discussion. In this brilliant use of him- 
self as the medium of inspiration lies his great 
strength. No one ever was less curious concerning 
what lay outside himself, and with a whimsical, 
conscious perversity he declined to consider valuable 
what he himself did not desire. Thus all that he 
says throbs with personality and touches intimately 
his own character and temperament. He, whose 
dearest wish would seem to be aloofness from his 
fellow-beings, opens to them his heart and soul and 
seldom speaks to them of aught besides the secrets 
within his private consciousness. So much does 
freedom for us. 



8 IRalpb Malbo jEmereon. 

It is interesting to learn that the president of Har- 
vard during Emerson's life there, Dr. John Thornton 
Kirkland, composed sermons in the epigrammatic 
style so familiar to the reader oi Society and Solitude 
and Conduct of Life, apparently putting them to- 
gether on the spot from disconnected notes. Whether 
Emerson caught this manner from him or devised it 
for himself is a matter of small importance. It is 
much more significant that in these early college days, 
before his mind had fairly passed out of its childhood, 
he initiated his Commonplace Book, that scrap-bag of 
reference from which in the course of his career so 
many treasurable sentences were to be drawn. Into 
it went quotations from poetry and prose, original 
sentiments, phrases for poetical use, and paraphrases 
of striking passages met with in his reading. When 
we recall that he was only eighteen when he left col- 
lege, we realise with what integrity the web of his 
life-work was spun from a mind singularly undiverted 
by the guidance of others. This trick of using his 
reading chiefly to provide texts and illustrations for 
his independent reflections served him for three-score 
years, and, characteristically preaching what he prac- 
tised, he upheld it with confidence as the only way 
in which a '' scholar " profitably could read. '' Books 
are the best of things, well used; abused, among 
the worst. What is the right use ? What is the 
one end which all means go to effect ? They are for 
nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book 
than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my 



own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. . . , 
Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can 
read God directly, the hour is too precious to be 
wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings."^ 

There were moments, nevertheless, when this 
shifting interest seemed to him his "cardinal vice of 
intellectual dissipation," a ''sinful strolling from book 
to book, from care to idleness"; but these were not 
his moments of conviction. Certainly he gained 
from his method all that could be gained. His strol- 
ling was done among the products of radiant minds. 
Nor did he always fulfil his tendency. It is reported 
that he ''pored over Montaigne, and knew Shake- 
speare almost by heart," while for the task of "writ- 
ing the character of Socrates" he allotted a year. 
But in the main he tied himself to no author long 
enough to risk following his leadership. His Aunt 
Mary, to whose opinions he listened always with 
reverence and whose letters he copied into his Com- 
monplace Book as models of style, encouraged his 
independence of other minds and outer influences. 
Much of the counsel upon which he laid most stress 
came to him straight from her ardent exhortation. 
The year after he left college, for example, she wrote 
to him as follows: 

" Solitude, which to people not talented to deviate 
from the beaten track, is the safe ground of medi- 
ocrity (without offending), is to learning and genius 
the only sure labyrinth, though sometimes gloomy, 

' The American Scholar. 



lo "Ralpb Wnl^o lEmereon^ 

to form the eagle-wing that will bear one farther 
than suns and stars. . . . Would to Providence 
your unfoldings might be there ! that it were not a 
wild and fruitless wish that you could be disunited 
from travelling with the souls of other men; of living 
and breathing, reading and writing, with one vital, 
time-fated idea, their opinions."^ Compare with 
this a passage from the essay on Culture, the most 
eloquent passage to be found therein: 

*' Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is, to 
genius, the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter 
where moult the wings which will bear it farther than 
suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his 
race must be defended from travelling with the souls 
of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and 
writing in the daily time-worn yoke of their opinions. " 

It hardly could have been from this good lady, 
however, that Emerson learned his lesson of manners. 
Her eccentricity knew no bounds, carrying her to the 
point of making her shroud, and, wearying of Death's 
tardy approach, wearing it as a day gown, and riding 
horseback in it through the streets of Concord. Em- 
erson had no leaning toward these strange forms of 
individuality. The benignant serenity of his mature 
life rested on his boyhood and young manhood. 
Those who knew him in school and college describe 
him as '* a slender, delicate youth ... of a sen- 
sitive, retiring nature," '' equable " and *' fair," not 
demonstrative or boisterous, but mirthful in his way, 

' j4 Memoir of Ralph IValdo Emerson. 



and keenly appreciative of humour. He was unob- 
trusive and kindly, and spoke with deliberation and 
a certain ''courtly hesitation." Especially he was 
self-contained and somewhat aloof, though affable 
in his relations with his companions. Many of these 
qualities and characteristics find their place in the 
picture he paints for us of manners in the abstract 
man, and also occasionally he lays stress upon some 
feature of behaviour that he does not possess, but 
covets. Here, as elsewhere, his teachings are rooted 
in his natural tendencies and desires. ''Those who 
are not self-possessed obtrude and pain us, "he says. 
" Self-reliance is the basis of behaviour, as it is the 
guaranty that the powers are not squandered in too 
much demonstration." The squandering of power in 
demonstration was at no time of his life a temptation, 
as he had the dread of a Greek for anything resem- 
bling excess. In self-possession of the external sort, 
however, he was not rich. 

Mrs. Cheney tells an amusing anecdote of an ex- 
temporaneous address given by him to the boys of 
a Reform Schoolship. He was embarrassed and con- 
fused, and his manner was awkward. A few days 
after, the teacher of reading, wishing to impress upon 
the boys of the ship the importance of ease and 
freedom of utterance, mimicked the awkwardness 
and confusion of an inexperienced speaker, and asked 
"Now, boys, what should you think if you heard 
a man speak so?" "Should think it was Mr. Emer- 
son! " they shouted. Well aware of this deficiency. 



12 IRalpb 'CHlalbo lEmereom 

and not perhaps aware of the gracious wisdom and 
dignity that found their way to his manner, from the 
intensity of his moral conviction, he was fond of 
exalting the social gifts of readiness and ease. His 
lines on Tact, so deplorable as an illustration of his 
poetic method, are a partly satirical expression of his 
respect for these endowments: 

What boots it, thy virtue, 
What profit thy parts, 
While one thing thou lackest, 
The art of all arts! 
The only credentials. 
Passport to success, 
Opens castle and parlour. 
Address, man, address. 

To what we call pure animal spirits he was entirely 
a stranger. Even as a boy his habit was to smile 
where others would laugh, nor could he perceive 
the happy charm of hearty, spontaneous laughter. 
''What a seneschal and detective is laughter!" he 
says, 'Mt seems to require several generations of 
education to train a squeaking or a shouting habit 
out of a man. Sometimes when in almost all expres- 
sions the Choctaw and the slave have been worked 
out of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his 
contemptit)le squeals of joy. It is necessary for the 
purification of drawing rooms, that these entertaining 
explosions should be under strict control." His ob- 
jection to Margaret Fuller, the friend of his middle 
years, was that she made him laugh too much, and 



£mei 



. f I'M C 



Ralph IValdo Emerson, 

From a phoiograph taken in 1847. 



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Dr. Holmes has vividly depicted his mode of exhibit- 
ing mirth: '' When he laughed it was under protest, 
as it were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that 
the explosion had to seek another respiratory channel, 
and found its way out quietly, while his eyebrows, 
and nostrils and all his features betrayed the 
'ground swell,' as Prof. Thayer happily called it, of 
the half-suppressed convulsion."^ 

From the experiences of his youth Emerson was 
able to deduce a philosophy of training for young 
people singularly free from impracticability, yet highly 
imaginative and far-sighted. Books always are 
needed for purposes of culture, he holds, but books 
are good ''only as far as a boy is ready for them." 
'* He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, 
fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is 
right and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up 
if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. 
Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and 
boat, are all educators, liberalisers; and so are danc- 
ing, dress, and street talk; and provided only the boy 
has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain, 
these will not serve him less than the books. " Minor 
accomplishments Emerson laid stress upon as ena- 
bling the youth to "judge intelligently of much on 
which otherwise he would give a pedantic squint." 
All the liberal arts common to the schoolboy age are 
" lessons in the art of power, which it is his main 
business to learn. " These pleadings for the graces of 

^Life of Emerson. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. 



14 IRalpb XRHalbo lEmerson* 

training denied to the poor by reason of their cost in 
money are made with a keen perception of their 
negative, as well as of their positive values. ''Their 
chief use to the youth is not amusement, but to be 
known for what they are, and not to remain to him 
occasions of heart burn. We are full of superstitions. 
Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not; 
the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth 
and breeding. One of the benefits of a college edu- 
cation is to show the boy its little avail. Balls, riding, 
wine parties and billiards pass to a poor boy for 
something fine and romantic, which they are not; 
and a free admission to them on an equal footing, if 
it were possible, only once or twice, would be worth 
ten times its cost by undeceiving him. " ^ Here, ob- 
viously, he is thinking of himself and of his restric- 
tions, bringing into play again his splendid capacity 
for turning to the account of others his knowledge of 
his character, temperament, and environment. He 
placed little value on travel as a means to the highest 
culture, and he seems to have cared almost as little 
to explore other minds, except to find therein paral- 
lelism with his own. 

It was not merely, however, to give voice to his 
particular ideas that he thus clung to his particular 
experience. Very early he began to feel the influ- 
ence of the chief idea developed in his later work; 
the idea of a universal God, toward whom we 
tend in all our moments of high thought; whose 

' Essay on Culture, 



fiarl^ l?ear0* 15 

mind flows into our minds; whose soul flows in- 
to our souls, guiding us toward permanence and 
beauty in our thoughts and actions. In Plato's 
Symposium are certain passages which Emerson must 
often have read, and which might properly form the 
text of his collected writings. Diotima is instructing 
Socrates concerning the mysteries of love, uncertain 
if he will be able to attain the greater and more 
hidden ones: '' He who would proceed rightly in this 
matter should begin in youth to turn to beautiful 
forms; and first, if his instructor guide him rightly, he 
should learn to love one such form only — out of that he 
should create fair thoughts; and soon he will himself 
perceive that the beauty of one form is truly related 
to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in gen- 
eral is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to 
recognise that the beauty in every form is one and 
the same! And when he perceives this he will abate 
his violent love of the one which he will despise and 
deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all 
beautiful forms. . . . And the true order of going 
or being led by another to the things of love, is to 
use the beauties of earth as steps along which he 
mounts upwards for the sake of that other beauty, 
going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, 
and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair 
actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he 
arrives at the notion of absolute beauty and at last 
knows what the essence of beauty is. . . . But 
what if man had eyes to see the true beauty — the 



1 6 IRalpb IKDialbo lEmereom 

divine beauty I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, 
not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all 
the colours and vanities of human life — thither look- 
ing, and holding converse with the true beauty divine 
and simple, and bringing into being and educating true 
creations of virtue, and not idols only? Do you not 
see that in that communion only, beholding beauty 
with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to 
bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities; for he 
has hold not of an image but of a reality, and bring- 
ing forth and educating true virtue to become the 
friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may."^ 
To such a vision of divine beauty Emerson early 
aspired and early attained. With unerring instinct 
he sought to reveal it to others by the plain and 
homely use of his daily experience. His insight is 
that of a seer, his language that of a poet, his argu- 
ment that of a plain man acquainted with the plain 
facts of ordinary life. His power to bring down from 
Heaven the very soul of moral beauty, and show it 
in the protean forms of commonplace, gives him his 
especial influence over the young, who like to exalt 
their motives, and find ''sweeping a room to the 
glory of God " easier than sweeping it without a 
thought beyond its cleanliness. It is customary to 
think of Emerson as a '' philosopher " and a ''sage," 
but it is pleasanter and possibly truer to think of him 
as forever a meditative youth to whom life suddenly 
unfolded its beneficent meaning, making it impos- 

' Jowett's translation. 



jearli? ipear0* 



17 



sible for him to grow old or dispirited. The teach- 
ings of his boyhood are marvellously like the teach- 
ings of his age, and the freshness of his response to 
precious intuitions of eternal truth is kept to the 
end of his career. In the first chapter of his life we 
see him fix his eyes upon spiritual happiness, in 
the last chapter we find his gaze no less divinely 
innocent, no less joyously serene. 

'' The sun," he says in the earliest of his published 
writings — ''the sun illuminates only the eye of the 
man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the 
child. "^ Such childhood he never outgrew. 

^ Essay on Nature. 




CHAPTER II. 



PREPARATION. 



WHEN Emerson left college in 1821, he ex- 
pected ultimately to follow the tradition 
of the family and become a minister of 
religion. Without having applied himself with special 
interest to theological problems, he had been prepar- 
ing himself in his own way for his prospective work, 
and it was significant that a concern for the art of 
expression was prominent in his mind from the 
beginning. Many of the quotations and original re- 
flections in his Commonplace Books had been col- 
lected there with reference to their use in future 
sermons ; he was proud of his poet's fancies, and 
" hoped to put on eloquence as a robe," burning, he 
said, "after the aliquid immensum infinitusque which 
Cicero desired." In his boyish dreams he saw him- 
self holding his congregations by the power of ora- 
tory, taking sovereign possession of their emotions, 
and the vision was alluring, yet he was not diverted 
by it from his allegiance to pure sincerity. 

''Even a seraph's eloquence," he avowed, ''will 



18 



preparation* 19 

shamefully defeat its own end if it has not first won 
the heart of the defender to the cause he defends," 
and the future was to show the candour of this pro- 
testation. Thus, early in the morning hours, he 
found himself, without the delay of erratic wander- 
ing in alien fields by which the haggards of literature 
squander their energies. Although the pulpit was 
not long to hold him, no whit of his training for it 
was lost, and his warning note against the waste of 
time is prompted by his adequate economy of that 
precious possession. ''Profligacy," he says in his 
essay on WeoMh, " consists not in spending years of 
time or chests of money, but in spending them off 
the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts 
men and states is job-work ; declining from your 
main design, to serve a turn here or there. Nothing 
is beneath you if it is in the direction of your 
life ; nothing is great or desirable if it is off from 
that." 

Naturally, the line of his career revealed itself to 
him as the line of ethical instruction, and naturally, 
also, he practised almost in childhood the interroga- 
tion of his soul under the unflinching censorship of 
his doughty Aunt Mary, from whose devoted vigil- 
ance no child of the Emerson flock could hope to 
escape. It was with her that he corresponded con- 
cerning his psychological state. Nothing could speak 
better for the poise and clear sanity of his nature 
than that he escaped unscathed from this stimulating 
but dangerous influence exercised with so much 



20 IRalpb TKHalbo lEmer^on* 

force and persuasive eloquence during his impression- 
able years. He did escape, and moreover, he probed 
the mysticism of that curious exalted mind until he 
reached the flaming conviction inspiring all his own 
writings, the conviction of the direct dealing of God 
with the individual soul. He became the apostle 
whose beautiful utterance of the message made it his 
own, but it is pleasant to recognise the overwhelm- 
ing contribution to his creed by the poor lady, who 
seemed, she said, "to live to give pain rather than 
pleasure." 

The pursuit of style, however, although his aunt 
had her share in furthering it, was Emerson's per- 
sonal affair. No one could materially have helped 
him hammer out from the common vocabulary of our 
speech such expressive forms, such stately symbols, 
passages of such sincere distinction. During his col- 
lege years he had moved among the greater writers 
and in a certain sense he took them all for his models 
but not one of them for his master. It was a time 
of eloquence in Boston. Channing was preaching 
''sublime sermons" in Federal Street, Edward 
Everett had just returned from his five years in 
Europe, and was drawing all the young enthusiasm 
of his native town under his glittering spell. But 
Emerson's star differed from these in glory. Prophet 
of inspiration though he was, he spared no pains to 
provide for the 'Mnner light" a medium as artistic- 
ally interpretative as the artist within him could 
create. His method was the slow and searching ef- 



preparation 21 

fort of serious artists toward large and truthful ren- 
dering of a personal vision. 

Once he wrote to his aunt who had asked him to 
procure for her a copy of Baillie's poems : '' What do 
you want them for ? Only as I do in my slovenly 
way of thinking, for a kind of better word-hunting, 
that a phrase which catches the eye may be tortured 
in the mind till it chances to suggest a new thought 
or an old one with a new face ? " From these tor- 
tured phrases he evolved epithets of untainted and 
clean-cut felicity, compact, and vigorous bodies for 
his poetic and dignified ideas. His " slovenly think- 
ing," certainly not marked by the arduous ratiocina- 
tion of his theological comrades, was redeemed by 
the far from slovenly workmanship spent upon the 
form enshrining it. 

Professor Woodbury describes his manuscripts as 
filled with evidences of his reconsideration and re- 
touching, the language subjected to multitudinous 
revisions until the paper resembled palimpsest, the 
sentences modified, abated, and restricted to nar- 
rower outline until tempered to the exact fact, the 
''clean and clear distinction." 

''Do not put hinges to your work to make it 
cohere " is one of his directions to young writers, and 
the lack of " hinges " in his work has brought down 
upon him the adverse criticism of high authorities. 
Mr. Morley has expressed irritation with the "fer- 
vent votaries " who have praised his style ; Mat- 
thew Arnold declares that it "has not the requisite 



22 1?alpb Malbo jemereom 

wholeness of good tissue." Even Mr. Henry James, 
of whom we expect the utmost sensitiveness to the 
least obvious forms of art, utters the astonishing im- 
pression that Emerson's writings ''were not com- 
posed at all," and deems it a sign of his power that 
he is ''a striking exception to the general rule that 
writings live in the last resort by their form." Mr. 
Birrell refers to his ' 'unparalleled nonsequaciousness. " 
Carlyle, reading the Essays in sheets before their 
publication in England, found the style not entirely 
coherent, ''the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but 
as a beautiful square bag of duck shot held together 
by canvas." Emerson himself doubted if he were 
capable of artistic construction, and wrote to Carlyle 
about one of his early volumes : " In a fortnight or 
three weeks my little raft will be afloat. Expect 
nothing more of my powers of construction, no 
shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, 
only boards and logs tied together." 

All this, apparently, because with the exhausting 
labour of those who regard their workmanship as the 
means to great ends, he has concealed the skeleton 
of his construction, and has concentrated upon his 
central idea countless statements of truth related to 
it by delicate unseen connections, too exquisitely 
realised to be distorted into prominence. His essays 
are all pictures of the soul under different lights and 
in different positions toward life. The sentences are 
brief and perhaps fragmentary, as the crisp, broken 
brushwork of certain painters may be called so. But 



Ipreparatiom 23 

unity in literary style is no more really dependent 
upon the length of the sentence than unity in a 
picture is dependent upon the touch of the brush 
against the canvas. In one case as in the other the 
final co-ordinated effect is gained by a design that 
may be frankly before the eye as an arrangement of 
abstract lines and spaces, or may be suggested by an 
invisible harmony of the elements of the work. Cer- 
tain pictures seem to the decorative designer, accus- 
tomed to observe external patterns and outlines, 
quite without the architectonic quality when that 
very quality is supremely indicated by the relation 
of the values and colours and planes. It would be 
the mistake of shallow criticism to deny to Emerson 
the power to create a general impression, coherent 
and whole, with the heterogeneous material of his 
note-books. The idea in his mind was uniformly 
single and the contributed ideas from the works of 
others invariably converged to it in a perfect relation. 
His essay on Nature, first printed in 1836, but con- 
taining much fruit of the reflection indulged in during 
the pensive idle hours at Cambridge fifteen years 
earlier, furnishes a notable example of this organic 
unity. Its central idea, in fact, is nothing less than 
the unity of all nature, physical and spiritual. In the 
first chapter of the series forming the essay, this 
herald note of aesthetic comprehension is sounded : 

**When we speak of nature in this manner, 
we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the 
mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by 



24 IRalpb TKIlalbo jEmereon* 

manifold natural objects. It is this which distin- 
guishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter from the 
tree of the poet. The charming landscape which 1 saw 
this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty 
or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, 
and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of 
them owns the landscape. There is a property in 
the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can 
integrate all the parts, that is, the poet." 

The different parts of the essay show the ministry 
of Nature to the senses, the nobler service rendered 
to the sense of beauty, the expression of the spirit 
through natural forms, the relation of human actions 
to the universal spirit (with emphasis again laid upon 
*' the unity in variety which meets us everywhere,") 
and, finally, the moral significance of this supreme 
law of art, everywhere observed. *Mt is not so per- 
tinent to man to know all the individuals of the 
animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and where- 
to is this tyrannising unity in his constitution, which 
evermore separates and classifies things, endeavour- 
ing to reduce the most diverse to one form. When 
1 behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to 
recite correctly the order and superposition of the 
strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is 
lost in a tranquil sense of unity. . . The problem 
of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty 
is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or 
blank that we see when we look at nature is in our 
eye. . . The reason why the world lacks unity 



lilBi^fe'^"^.- 



The Approach to Emerson's Home, 



preparation. 25 

and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is dis- 
united with himself." 

No observer with such an extraordinary percep- 
tion of synthesis in the external world, and in the 
region of spiritual suggestion, could fail to attempt 
synthesis in giving expression to his thought ; nor 
could the attempt be completely a failure. With 
Emerson it came much nearer to being completely a 
success. Logically his arguments are non-existent. 
He does not argue at all in the strict sense of the 
word. But his art is rich and explicit, strong, and 
balanced, not deeply coloured, but with atmospheric 
depths and with a curious vibrating note of joy quite 
independent of his hopeful temperament — the joy of 
the artist skilfully moulding his material — the unmis- 
takable exultation of those who are consciously pro- 
ducing forms of beauty. 

There were to be, however, some years of plain 
drudgery before the happy thinker could apply him- 
self to the fulfilment of his natural destiny. While 
he was in college and before he was sixteen he had 
done at least enough school-teaching to earn a new 
coat for himself, and as soon as he was graduated he 
went to work in earnest as the assistant of his brother 
William who kept a school for young women in 
his mother's house. William was twenty, Waldo, 
eighteen, and the school was popular. Within three 
years Emerson had earned between two and three 
thousand dollars, at that time no mean reward for 
such labour, and quite sufficient to rouse the alarm 



26 1?alpb Malbo Cmereon* 

of his Spartan aunt who feared the effect upon him 
of such ease of circumstance. He himself was not 
impressed by the amenity of his situation. He de- 
scribed himself as *' lifting the truncheon against the 
fair-haired daughters" of the "raw city" and as 
''toiling through the miserable employment without 
even the poor satisfaction of doing it well." ''The 
good suspect me and the geese dislike me," he added, 
with a self-consciousness not usual in either his pub- 
lic or private intercourse ; and, still in this gloomy 
strain, he wrote his famous poem : " Good-by, proud 
world, 1 'm going home." Emphatically the school- 
room was too contracted for his chosen horizon, yet 
he seems to have been a satisfactory teacher along 
orthodox lines, winning the respect of his pupils and 
the approbation of their parents. We have only his 
own authority that, judged by his higher standards, 
he was something of a failure. He lacked as yet the 
independence of judgment that later forced him out 
of ruts worn by convention, and long afterward he 
blamed himself for not introducing the young minds 
with which he came into contact to contemplation 
of the eternal laws that called to him through the 
dull rattle of common occupations. In his room at 
night he was writing down his thoughts on morals, 
but he kept them safely out of the school-room and 
shyly grappled there with the genii of languages, 
geography, arithmetic, and chemistry, each wearing 
for him a fearful mien. It would be sad indeed for 
those fond of the pungent flavour of immaturity to 



preparation- 27 

miss the picture he draws of himself, terrified and 
embarrassed and stirred by youth's agitations among 
the '' fair haired daughters " who tormented him. 

Early in 1825 he gave over keeping school and 
entered the Divinity School at Cambridge but left it 
in a month's time in ill-health and with an affection 
of the eyes that forbade his reading. He presently 
resumed school-teaching for another year. He at- 
tended the lectures of the class he had expected to 
join in the Divinity School, however, and, with surely 
as little technical preparation as the most liberal 
Christian could wish, he was ''approbated to preach " 
by the Middlesex Association of Ministers, October 
10, 1826. 

Even yet his brief occupation of the pulpit was 
at some distance away. His first public sermon was 
delivered on the Sunday following his approbation, 
but his health immediately demanded close attention, 
and before the end of the year the weakness of his 
lungs drove him to a softer climate than that of New 
England. He spent the winter at St. Augustine, 
Florida, and systematically refrained from any exer- 
tion that could diminish his chance of recovery. 

In April he recorded that he had not written a 
sermon since leaving home, and the following winter, 
still far from sound, he wrote to his brother William 
that he was "living cautiously, yea, treading on 
eggs," to strengthen his constitution. He never 
wrote when he could walk, nor when he could laugh, 
he said, but made it his business to build up a fair 



28 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 

structure of physical strength and efficiency for his 
healthy mind to work within. It is interesting to 
contrast his temper in this regard with that of the 
youthful Channing, whose rule of life during his sea- 
son of boyish extravagance compelled him to sleep 
on the bare floor, endure cold, eat what he disliked, 
and sit at his books until the daylight broke upon his 
studies. By these means he thought to curb the 
flesh, and succeeded in almost ridding himself of its 
burden. 

Emerson's temperament in contrast to Channing's 
was lacking in nervous energy, and doubtless it 
would have required a stronger exertion of will to 
overcome the languor of invalidism, had he thought 
that the way of wisdom, than to yield to its benefi- 
cent influences. Nevertheless, if duty had whis- 
pered the message of activity his reply would have 
been that of the youth in his well-known quatrain, 
and nothing is more characteristic of his entire sanity 
than his attitude toward ill-health. Whatever his 
physical condition his reason was uniformly robust, 
and the philosophy he evolved from the experiences 
of illness is marked by the balance and sobriety of 
his natural judgment. 

Health, as the basis of excellence and beauty of 
appearance and performance, finds frequent mention 
in his works : ''The first wealth is health," he urges 
in his essay on Power, '* Sickness is poor-spirited, and 
cannot serve anyone : it must husband its resources 
to live. But health or fulness answers its own ends 



preparation. 29 

and has to spare ; runs over and inundates the 
neighbourhoods and creeks of other men's necessi- 
ties." He speaks with approbation of the Greek de- 
light in the perfection of the body, declares that all 
healthy things are sweet-tempered, that extraordi- 
nary health is needed for performance of great mark, 
and that '' no labour, pains, temperance, poverty, nor 
exercise that can gain it must be grudged." And 
against the whimpering habit of invalidism, possibly 
more popular fifty years ago than now, he raises his 
voice in lusty expostulation : 

''There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to 
all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their 
distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have 
slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, 
or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to 
hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to 
which all housemates bring serene and pleasant 
thoughts, by corruption and groans." 

These were precepts that had their origin in 
his struggle with a constitutional delicacy, ominous 
enough in one of his family. His younger brother Ed- 
ward with a similar tendency to disease, worked him- 
self into an early grave ; and his brother Charles died 
at twenty-seven. Before Edward died his mind gave 
way, and Emerson curiously expressed his belief that 
no such evil was in store for him, declaring that he 
had so much mixture of silliness in his intellectual 
frame as to temper him against it. Whether its name 
was silliness or sense, there certainly was mingled 



30 1?alpb Mal5o lEmereon* 

with his other mental qualities a saving element that 
kept him free from extravagance and irregularity, 
and, prompted by this, he won back his health by 
slow degrees, grudging the idle hours and gaining 
little pleasure from the sight of strange places, loving 
not ''the look of foreign men," but patiently abiding 
the time for action, and losing nothing we may well 
assume for the gradual ripening of his thoughts before 
he committed them to publicity. 

He had the faculty of detaching himself from his 
life, from his mirth and from his melancholy — at this 
time the two were mingled in his temperament — 
from his suffering, his disappointments, and even 
from his convictions. He held them away from him 
and pondered them, with the result of finally offering 
them in a generalised form wonderfully adapted to 
the needs of individualities with which his own had 
little in common ; with the result, too, of losing the 
sharp tang of reality associated with personal exper- 
ience. Indomitably as he clung to facts and to the 
symbols of common life, he could not make them 
savour of their mother earth after he had appropriated 
them. The very incidents of the dooryard and the 
threshold became remote under his spiritualising 
touch. '' Thought makes everything fit for use," he 
says in his lecture on the poet. '\ . . Small and 
mean things serve as well as great symbols. . . . 
The poorest experience is rich enough for all the 
purposes of expressing thought." And thus it was 
with him. He scorned nothing because of its home- 



Ipreparatlon. 31 

liness, but the homeliest word in the language lost 
its power to stir the pulse with its reality when it 
became the vehicle of his disinterested thought. 
''Let us treat the men and women well, treat them 
as if they were real," he says ; '' perhaps they are." 
And stoutly as we may believe that they are, he 
draws us within the circle of his doubt. 

He early experienced and seems never to have 
lost the feeling that comes perhaps to all persons 
once, — the feeling that we are merely dissolving 
types of universal life, and can call nothing our own. 
Intimately as he searched himself and probed his 
personal experience, it was invariably desire for 
knowledge of the type, never the egoism of the 
individual, that impelled him. No petty self-concern 
compromised his consecration to universal interests. 
It is a curious paradox that he alienates himself from 
us in his very refusal to conceive himself as separate 
from us. Seeking our features in his soul and reveal- 
ing himself as the likeness of the human world, he 
yet fails to come very close to us, because he ignores 
in us the qualities not also present in his own nature, 
and in himself he ignores whatever he cannot mould 
to a universal application. Readers impressed by 
his emphasis upon habits of self-reliance, indepen- 
dence, the protection of the individuality by solitude, 
the impossibility of adequate communication between 
any two human minds, the divine right of self-de- 
velopment, find puzzling his freedom from peculiarity, 
his wide and general use of the essential spiritual 



32 IRalpb IKHal&o Emcreom 

truth of humanity ; but the two apparently opposed 
attitudes toward life are not difficult to harmonise in 
a thinker so rich in moral imagination. He has many 
times made perfectly clear the steps toward harmony, 
from the differentiated souls of man to the envelop- 
ing soul to which he seldom gives the name of God. 
The realm of which he writes in The Dcemonic and 
the Celestial Love is the one to which he constantly 
directs his thought : 

Thou must mount for love 
Into vision where all form 
In one only form dissolves ; 



Where unlike things are like ; 

Where good and ill, 

And joy and moan, 

Melt into one. 

There Past, Present, Future, shoot 

Triple blossoms from one root ; 

Substances at base divided 

In their summits are united ; 

There the holy essence rolls, 

One through separated souls. 



He stood, composed and ready, at the outset of 
his long career, the same in all essential regards as at 
the end. The antithesis of the mythical Undine, he 
seemed a spirit continually seeking a material envel- 
ope of human associations to make visible his con- 
nection with his fellow beings. That its form should 
be beautiful he insisted as an artist ; that it should 



preparation* 



33 



illustrate truth was indispensable to him as both 
artist and moralist; that it should wear to us the 
familiar face of life, as our kindly neighbour he in- 
tended ; but what he showed us was instead the in- 
scrutible countenance of that inner life of which we 
stand somewhat in awe at our bravest ; to which, 
despite its identity with ourselves, we bear almost 
the relation of strangers. 




CHAPTER III. 
RELIGION. 

ON the eleventh of March, 1829, Emerson, 
then in his twenty-sixth year, was or- 
dained as the colleague of the Reverend 
Henry Ware of the Second Church of Boston. He 
had already substituted for Mr. Ware during the 
illness of the latter, and a parish familiar with his 
preaching accorded him seventy-four out of seventy- 
nine votes. A few weeks later he became the sole 
incumbent, and in September he was married to 
Ellen Tucker, a charming frail New England girl to 
whom for nine months he had been engaged. 

Thus he was launched upon his profession under 
the most smiling auspices, and with the promise of a 
brilliant future. For three years he preached in the 
''venerable house " his fathers "built to God," and 
apparently without arousing any doubt of his con- 
formity with the Unitarian thought of his congrega- 
tion, although orthodox minds were shocked by his 
''untheological style." Mr. Cabot, having read the 

one hundred and seventy-one sermons still lying by 

34 



IReligiom 35 

Emerson's request in manuscript, can report nothing 
unconventional or revolutionary to be found upon 
their now ancient pages, but he reminds us that we 
have travelled far on the liberal road since the time of 
their writing, and are not perhaps so keen as Emer- 
son's contemporaries to catch the note of change. 

It may be significant that from the few who have 
set down their impressions of the young preacher 
during these first years, we learn more of his gra- 
ciousness of presence, his benignity of countenance, 
the sweetness of his voice and the beauty of his 
elocution, than of his special teachings. No doubt 
what Lowell said much later was then as true ; that 
many went not so much to hear what Emerson said 
as to hear Emerson. One of his hearers has re- 
corded, however, ''an infinite charm of simplicity 
and wisdom " in an early sermon, ''with occasional 
illustrations from nature." "These," he adds "were 
about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind 
which I had ever heard ; 1 could understand them, if 
not the fresh philosophical novelties of the dis- 
course. Another describes him as coming to the 
pulpit of a church with whose minister he was ex- 
changing and preaching a sermon "with his chin in 
the air in scorn of the whole human race." It is 
difficult now to find in any of his writings scorn of 
humanity, but to an unsympathetic mind his stout 
ethical independence of low or utilitarian ends may 
easily have worn this face. Unconsciously to him- 
self he was nearing the breaking of his bonds to the 



36 IRalpb Malbo jBrncraon* 

ministry, an act that, when at last he came to it, 
was performed with such grace and kindness as to 
seem more like benediction than defiance. 

The religious life of New England for many years 
had been flowing from old forms into new ones, and 
was now curiously mingling the rigid traditions of 
Calvinism with the influences of German and classic 
philosophy and scientific investigation. Gradually 
the pale keen Puritan atmosphere of the New Eng- 
land Church had softened to a type of Congrega- 
tionalism in which the mind could expand toward 
individual inquiry, and during the first quarter of 
the Nineteenth Century the Unitarians carried still 
farther the personal testing of religious belief. 

In 1830, the year after Emerson's ordination, the 
separation of the Unitarian from the Calvinistic 
churches was practically complete, and Dr. Chan- 
ning, representing the more spiritual side of the sect, 
dwelt fervently upon the right of the rational nature 
to guide belief, but found no difficulty in accepting, 
under the guidance of his reason, the supernatural 
character of Christ and the Bible. This, essentially, 
was the Unitarianism under the shelter of which 
Emerson stood, and was wholly different from 
the ''Sensational" philosophy, as it was called, 
of the more materialistic thinkers who followed 
Locke and Bentham, denied the existence of innate 
ideas, based morality upon utility, and recognised 
''nothing in the intellect that was not first in the 
senses." Pure idealism (later to be called Transcend- 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

After an engraving hy Schoff of the original draining hj' 
S. W. Rowse, in the possession of C. E. "Norton, Esq. 
By permission of Houghton, Mifflin, &■ Co. 



IReligiom 37 

entalism from Kant's use of the term '* transcendental" 
to denominate intuitive ideas transcending experi- 
ence), had not yet gained the doctrinal solidity and 
formality of a school, but was diffused through the 
higher regions of New England thought. 

Intimations of Transcendental philosophies had 
reached Emerson from various European sources, 
and in 1827 Carlyle's articles upon German literature 
had appeared in the Edinburgh Review, written at the 
glowing period of their author's life when he could 
speak hopefully of an era of ''new Spirituality and 
Belief; in the midst of old Doubt and Denial, as it 
were, a new revelation of Nature, and the Freedom 
and Infinitude of Man, wherein Reverence is again 
rendered compatible with Knowledge, and Art and 
Religion are one." Coleridge also brought his 
readers on both sides of the Atlantic in contact with 
German thought, and people interested in the things 
of the mind were generally astir with the quickening 
of ideas that were certainly not new but that were 
then unfamiliar. How far Emerson was influenced 
by these teachings can hardly be estimated ; not 
more, perhaps, than by the Greek writers with 
whom he had become acquainted in college ; but 
he read them all according to his custom, for the 
''tustres," and let the suggestions that came from 
them melt gently into the simple belief which he 
finally succeeded in detaching from the abstruse 
speculation and argument so repugnant to his direct 
mental vision. As "an eternal man," to use one of 



38 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 

his own vivid characterisations, he could not any- 
where find a philosophy flexible enough to fit with- 
out constraint his intuitive wisdom. It accorded 
completely with his temperament to accept the 
conception of a Universal Mind or Soul of which all 
nature is the expression, and of a faculty by which 
divinity may be recognised and known. Such an 
interpretation of Nature and God had an indescrib- 
able fascination for a mind constantly craving beauty 
of thought as an element of spiritual life, and 
he passionately made his own this doctrine of the 
ages by consistently disconnecting it from all fixed 
symbols and from narrow or limiting systems and 
dogmas. So far he was independent of local influ- 
ences and after what he characterises as ''the war 
between institutions and nature " had begun in the 
society surrounding him he stood among the contend- 
ing forces, seeking a leader. ''I need instructors," 
he exclaimed, with a certain pathos in the innocent 
humility of the cry, '' God's greatest gift is a teacher; 
and when will He send me one full of truth and of 
boundless benevolence and heroic sentiments ? " He 
was suffering the singularity of all who in aim and 
insight are raised above their companions. His 
destiny as a master precluded for him the comfort of 
adherence to any school or teacher. 

No teaching of the ancients received more 
promptly his joyous approval than the doctrine of 
the Flowing. "Here is the difference," he said, 
''betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails 



IRcligion. 39 

a symbol to one sense which was a true sense for a 
moment, but soon becomes old and false." In his 
position as a Christian minister he could not lay 
aside his poetic character, and by the latter he was 
led to question the benefit gained from traditional 
forms of worship. 

In 1832 he astonished the members of his con- 
gregation by proposing to them the discontinuance 
of an institution so closely interwoven with their 
reverent devotion as to seem inseparable from it; the 
rite of the Lord's Supper which he found himself 
unable to regard as a suitable commemoration of the 
spirit of Christ. He proposed that the use of the 
bread and wine be dispensed with, and the service 
made one of the spirit only, informal and voluntary. 
His hold upon his people was so strong that the 
suggestion was debated though not accepted, and he 
went up into the White Hills where he argued with 
his own soul concerning the course he should pursue. 
That he approached the subject in a mood far re- 
moved from critical superiority is obvious not merely 
from our knowledge of his temper, but from the 
tone of his journal during the interval of uncertainty 
while church and priest were pondering their respec- 
tive attitudes. '' it seems not worth while for 
them who charge others with exalting forms above 
the moon to fear forms themselves with extravagant 
dislike," he admitted, but the conclusion was fore- 
gone, and he returned to resign his office. 

In the sermon announcing his resignation he 



40 *RaIpb Malbo lemereon^ 

deals cogently and winningly with the cause of his 
separation from the church, and in a manner that 
frequently recalls his own counsel to those engaged 
in religious argument, not to '' put yourself in a false 
position with your contemporaries by indulging a 
vein of hostility and bitterness," but ''though your 
views are in straight antagonism to theirs " to as- 
sume ''that you are saying precisely that which all 
think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your 
paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of 
a doubt." 

For the one supreme occasion he carefully sup- 
ports his instinctive conviction with arguments less 
vital and important to him than to his hearers. He 
examines the authority on which the ordinance of 
the Communion rests, showing himself capable of 
orderly dialectics with full attention to subordinate 
and specific illustrations of his central idea. But the 
central idea finally is emphasised in a passage of ex- 
traordinary sincerity which even in this day of liberal 
interpretations, rings in the mind as one of the 
clearest and most courageous appeals to inherent 
morality possible to be made from any pulpit. 

" If 1 understand the distinction of Christianity," 
he says, " the reason why it is to be preferred over 
all other systems and is divine is this, that it is a 
moral system; that it presents men with truths 
which are their own reason, and enjoins practices 
that are their own justification; that if miracles may 
be said to have been its evidence to the first Chris- 



IReligion* 41 

tians, they are not its evidence to us, but the doc- 
trines themselves; that every practice is Christian 
which praises itself, and every practice unchristian 
which condems itself. 1 am not engaged to Christi- 
anity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is 
not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that 
binds me to it, — let these be the sandy foundations 
of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its 
reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the 
rest it gives to mind, the echo it returns to my 
thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason 
through all its representation of God and His Provi- 
dence; and the persuasion and courage that come 
out thence to lead me upward and onward. Free- 
dom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object 
simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions 
then should be as flexible as the wants of men. 
That form out of which the life and suitableness 
have departed, should be as worthless in its eyes as 
the dead leaves that are falling around us. 

''And therefore, although for the satisfaction of 
others I have labored to show by the history that this 
rite was not intended to be perpetual; although I 
have gone back to weigh the expressions of Paul, I 
feel that here is the true point of view. In the midst 
of considerations as to what Paul thought, and why 
he so thought, I cannot help feeling that it is time 
misspent to argue to or from his convictions, or 
those of Luke and John, respecting any form. I 
seem to lose the substance in seeking the shadow. 



42 IRalpb Mal^o lEmereon. 

*' That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; 
that for which Jesus gave Himself to be crucified; 
the end that animated the thousand martyrs and 
heroes who have followed His steps, was to redeem 
us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our 
well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole 
world was full of idols and ordinances. The Jewish 
was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no 
life, and the Almighty God was pleased to qualify 
and send forth a man to teach men that they must 
serve Him with the heart; that only that life was re- 
ligious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice 
was smoke, and forms were shadows. This man 
lived and died true to this purpose; and now, with 
His blessed word and life before us. Christians must 
contend that it is a matter of vital importance, — 
really a duty, to commemorate him by a certain 
form, whether that form be agreeable to their under- 
standings or not! Is not this to make vain the gift 
of God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the 
dial? Is not this to make men — to make ourselves, — 
forget that not forms, but duties; not names, but 
righteousness and love are enjoined; and that in the 
eye of God there is no other measure of the value of 
any one form than the measure of its use? " 

This limpid statement, suffused with feeling, but 
without heat or bitterness or superfluity of expres- 
sion, indicates a plane of discussion below which 
Emerson never sank, although he was many times 
to rise above it. It is related of him that on the 



IReligiom 43 

evening when his church was considering his propo- 
sition, he sat talking with undisturbed serenity with 
a fellow-clergyman on literature and other topics 
alien to his personal concern, until, as he rose to 
leave, he said gently: "This is probably the last 
time we shall meet as brethren in the same calling." 
It was characteristic of him to let nothing so indi- 
vidual and fragmentary as his private loss or gain 
interrupt the harmony of his mind; and though he 
may have been saddened by his inability to carry 
his congregation with him to the spiritual altitude 
where he was most at home, there is no one in his- 
tory of whom it is more possible to believe that his 
sorrow under such circumstances was altruistic and 
devoid of self-pity or wounded pride. 

Although his farewell sermon illustrates both his 
candour and his kindness, it suggests in its careful 
phrasing the place in which he stood. He was later 
to warn young preachers: ''When there is any dif- 
ference felt between the foot-board of the pulpit and 
the floor of the parlor, you have not yet said that 
which you should say." The foot-board of the pul- 
pit gave in this instance a slight rigidity to the form 
in which the sapient thought found its expression, 
and the effect is not without its value. In his en- 
deavour to make very plain to a deeply interested 
public the beliefs that were to separate his path from 
theirs, he abstained from the strongly individual idiom 
by which his later utterances are marked and some- 
times marred. In his famous Divinity School Address, 



44 IRalpb Malbo jEmereon^ 

delivered six years later before the senior class in 
Divinity College, Cambridge, the style has notably 
changed. It is more richly coloured and various, 
and the ideas are clothed in words of memorable 
beauty. There is even a touch of rhetorical fluency 
in such passages as this in which the religious senti- 
ment is exalted: 

''Wonderful is its power to charm and to com- 
mand. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of 
the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and 
rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, 
and the silent song of the stars is it." The occa- 
sional perversity of metaphor in the effort toward 
poignant statement of feeling gave to the mocking 
youth of the period its opportunity. The first bio- 
grapher of Theodore Parker describes the promis- 
ing young graduates as repairing in numbers to 
the apothecary shops to discover what else beside 
*' myrrh and rosemary" Religion was, and adverse 
critics were used to toss and trample these phrases 
with zeal, ''thinking they had the man in them and 
were punishing him well." The deep poetry of the 
author's mind could not be obscured, however, by 
the straggling clouds of fantasy now and then trail- 
ing across the utterance of his inspiration. The 
opening sentences are addressed to the aesthetic 
mood, and present an exquisite picture of lovely 
nature charged with the joy of the unwearied and 
unsophisticated beholder: 

" In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury 



IReliQion* 45 

to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the 
buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and 
gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, 
and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of 
Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom 
to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the 
transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spir- 
itual rays. Man under them seems a young child, 
and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes 
the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes 
again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature 
was never displayed more happily. The corn and 
the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and 
the never-broken silence with which the old bounty 
goes forward has not yielded yet one word of ex- 
planation." From this richly sensuous strain he 
passes to the felicitous expression of the beauty of 
holiness, not for an instant forgetting the subjection 
of the mind to the principles that rule alike in art 
and morals, not for an instant magnifying the par- 
ticular above the general. The sentiment of virtue, 
he declares, is a reverence and delight in the pres- 
ence of certain divine laws before which the great 
world shrinks at once into a mere illustration and 
fable of the mind. ''Thought may work cold and 
intransitive in things and find no end or unity; but 
the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart 
gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign 
over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eter- 
nity, do seem to break out into joy." The first 



46 IRalpb TRUalbo lEmereon- 

suggestion of positive departure from the doctrines of 
the Christian Church came in a sentence so filled 
with the magic of feeling that the delicate removal of 
one of the pillars of orthodoxy could hardly be real- 
ised. '' This sentiment (of virtue)," the serene voice 
continued, '' is divine and deifying. It is the beati- 
tude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it 
the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital 
mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by 
following the great, and hopes to derive advantages 
from another, by showing the fountain of all good to 
be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, 
is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says 
' I ought ' when love warms him; when he chooses, 
warmed from on high, the good and great deed; 
then, deep melodies wander through his soul from 
Supreme Wisdom." 

Teaching much more dynamic was to follow, and 
was heard with dismay by many who had gathered 
to attend the address. Emerson cut clearly through 
the fogs of semi-Liberalism with a crystalline elo- 
quence. Of Christ he declared that He belonged to 
the true race of prophets, that He saw the mystery 
of the soul, and, ''drawn by its severe harmony, 
ravished with its beauty. He lived in it, and had His 
being there "; that '' alone in all history He estimated 
the greatness of man," that He saw ''that God incar- 
nates Himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew 
to take possession of His World." But this was not 
the Christ taught by the Church. "The idioms of 



IReUgion. 47 

His language and the figures of His rhetoric have 
usurped the place of His truth; and churches are not 
built on His principles, but on His tropes." The first 
defect of Christianity was pointed out to be its exag- 
geration of the personal, the positive, and the ritual, 
its dwelling ''with noxious exaggeration about the 
person of Jesus." ''The soul knows no persons," 
was the oracular sentence which has formed the text 
for so many a Liberal sermon since that fiery July 
day. Nor did the doctrine of miracles performed by 
Christ escape the shining blade of this independent 
mind. Christ spoke of miracles, "for He felt that 
man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth ; and 
He knew that this daily miracle shines as the charac- 
ter ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced 
by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is 
Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and 
the falling rain." 

With a desire, not now misunderstood by the truly 
religious thinker, to identify the Holy Spirit in man 
with the spirit of Christ and with the immanent 
mind of God, Emerson prayed the young students 
of Divinity not to degrade the life and dialogues of 
Christ by insulating them and making them peculiar, 
but instead to let them "lie as they befel, alive and 
warm, part of human life and of the landscape and 
of the cheerful day." He besought his hearers to 
search the living revelation of God in the Moral 
Nature, and to look within themselves for intuitive 
knowledge of the divine laws, to "go alone; to 



48 1?alpb lKIlal^o lemereon* 

refuse the good models, even those which are sacred 
in the imagination of men, and dare to love God 
w^ithout mediator or veil." 

In this address practically all that was essential in 
Emerson's belief was stated without explanation and 
without arrogance but with a perfectly definite moral 
purpose. Whatever he preached thereafter in the 
domain of ethics was merely a different expression of 
the convictions embodied with more than his usual 
care for obvious construction and composition in his 
appeal to the young men who were about to teach 
in the name of religion. A few were stirred by the 
imaginative verity of his outlook and by the poetry 
of his message. Theodore Parker, for one, went 
home and recorded in hisjournal : ''My soul is roused 
and this week I shall write the long-meditated ser- 
mons on the state of the Church and the duties of 
these times. " This fairly represents the nature of En\- 
erson's influence even to this day. As he would 
have wished, his mission has been to rouse the souls 
of others to the expression of their own thoughts. 
The fact that he did not often pin himself to anything 
like a doctrinal declaration, that he never failed to 
leave in his work an avenue of escape for the imagina- 
tion into the region of eternal mystery, has given 
him his peculiar hold upon spiritual minds of all 
classes of belief. The difference between him and 
the other '' mystics" and reformers of his time might 
fairly be compared to the difference between any 
great painter and the Preraphaelites. The latter rep- 



IReligion* 49 

resented fragments of truth as if they comprised the 
whole ; the master, on the contrary, continually sug- 
gests the curving of the spheral universe and the 
presence of hidden corollaries and even antipodal 
truths harmonised in exquisite generalisation. Meta- 
physicians and psychologists found Emerson an im- 
possible man with whom to argue, since he calmly 
stated that he could not possibly give one argument 
on which any of his doctrines stood. ''1 do not 
know what arguments mean in reference to any ex- 
pression of a thought," he said, and it is conceivable 
that his position of mediator between truth and man, 
the position of Christ Himself to orthodox believers, 
but tenable, according to Emerson's creed, by any 
listener at the gates of conscience, seemed to many 
reverent souls presumption. It gave him, however, 
that access to the simple mind by which moral lead- 
ers are distinguished from theologians. One of his 
congregation said with sincerity: ''We are very 
simple people ; we cannot understand anyone but 
Mr. Emerson," and despite his occasional lapses into 
a vaguely metaphysical dialect disturbing to our real- 
isation of his greatness, the larger part of his writing 
on religion is limpid with pure conviction. He told his 
hearers that if the moral sentiment is in the heart, 
God is there ; that when the half gods of tradition 
and rhetoric depart, the way is made clear for belief 
in the one true and immanent Deity; that the laws of 
God are the same wherever manifested in Nature or 
in the human heart, that all the religions of the world 



50 IRalpb Mal&o j£mcvBon. 

have their origin in one religious sentiment, and that 
there is a force always at work to make the best bet- 
ter and the worst good. He told them to learn to 
walk alone with God and to receive from Him the 
vital principle of rectitude ; to lay aside dogma and 
liturgy as cumbersome garments hindering the free 
movement of the spirit ; to be incurious of immor- 
tality and to ask no questions of the Supreme Power, 
to work with high aims and to love work, to fill 
their hearts with kindness and throw themselves joy- 
fully into the sublime order. The words oftenest upon 
his lips were ''joy," ''beauty," "love." Matthew 
Arnold found his temper of serene optimism the chief 
element in his wisdom, and hardly to be overrated. 
John Morley, on the other hand, is inclined to resent 
somewhat the indifference with which he regarded 
'*the world's bitter puzzles." His reluctance to 
dwell upon Sin and Death seems to this sound critic 
to indicate a certain wilfulness in his point of view. 
" He had no eye, like Dante's, for the vileness, the 
cruelty, the utter despicableness to which humanity 
may be moulded. If he saw them at all, it was 
through the softening and illusive medium of general- 
ised phrases. Nor was he ever shocked and driven 
into himself by ' the immoral thoughtlessness ' of men. 
The courses of Nature, and the prodigious injustices 
of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor 
awe. For the fatal Nemesis or terrible Erinnys, 
daughters of Erebus and Night, Emerson substi- 
tutes a fair-weather abstraction named Compen- 



r 



hat 

i'Ct- 

:i to 

the 

and 

ic free 

r, 

ove work, to fill 

wtht esjoy- 

.... The words oftenest upon 

beauty," '^love." Matthew 

„r . ,.^*v^\^r^ the chief 

Ralph PValdo Emerson. -overrated. 

From the portrait hy Scott. In Concord' Pt^h r. ^^ reSeill 

whicii lit regarded 
actance to 
r^nd 5 seems to this sound critic 

;s in his point of view. 
.. ., for the vileness, the 
leness to which humanity 
iw them at all, it was 
ve medium of general- 
r shocked and driven 
;htlessness ' of men. 
and ' ^^us injustices 

neither horror nor 
terrible Erinnys, 
ubsti- 
.omoen- 



IReligiom 51 

sation." Perhaps Arnold's attitude is the fairer of 
the two. 

Emerson's religion was constructive to the highest 
degree, and those who judge it fragmentarily miss its 
beneficent purpose. In his essay on the ''fair- 
weather abstraction named Compensation " he does 
not so much ignore evil as recognise in it the tragedy 
of lost opportunity for good. " Under all this run- 
ning sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and 
flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss 
of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or 
a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, 
excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up 
all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature, 
truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the 
absence or departure of the same. Nothing, False- 
hood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade 
on which as a background the living universe paints 
itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it ; it cannot 
work, for it is not. It cannot work any good ; it can- 
not work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is 
worse not to be than to be." This is not very 
different from the Biblical teaching that whoso 
findeth Christ findeth life and that he who sinneth 
against Christ wrongeth his own soul, that all 
who hate Christ love death. 

The virtue of Emerson's "gospel " as it is called by 
those who decline to call it philosophy, lies in its ex- 
traordinary breadth. '' He had not a broad intel- 
lect," said Carlyle, ''but it was clear and sometimes 



52 IRalpb Mal&o j£mcveon. 

even profound." Yet breadth is certainly the dis- 
tinction of a religious belief with which neither 
science nor art can quarrel, to which the religions of 
the past have contributed and which has combined 
so fruitfully with the religion of the later day. 
Much has been claimed for Emerson's teaching that 
is not found in it by the candid inquirer, but the 
strongest element of its ethical influence has not been 
too widely dwelt upon. It consists in his recognition 
of ethical law as related to or identical with the fun- 
damental law in all other departments of human ac- 
tivity. The '' unity of nature " has been a phrase of 
vague suggestion with many writers and a theme of 
irresistible fascination with a few, but no one has 
more persistently elucidated its interior meaning 
than Emerson ; none has traced its illustrations 
through more varied fields of thought ; and none has 
spent upon it more passionate faith. It was this ap- 
prehension of underlying law that made him an evo- 
lutionist before Darwin and Spencer and caused him 
to accept without hesitation or delay their discoveries 
in scientific truth as they reached him. 

He considered that all nature is moral, but it is 
even more significant that he saw all morality as law, 
not less purely the outcome of system and order in the 
universe than is the geological structure of the eternal 
hills. The '* new teacher " described in the Divinity 
School address is one who '* shall see the identity of 
the law of gravitation with purity of heart." Such a 
teacher would necessarily perceive that ''the history 



IRelifiion. 53 

of Nature, from first to last, is incessant advance 
from less to more, from rude to finer organisation, the 
globe of matter thus conspiring with the principle of 
undying hope in man/' Such a teacher would inev- 
itably insist upon the postponement of private ends 
to public good and would find in all high types of 
civilisation the natural evolution of the individual 
morality. And such a teacher would see also that 
the severity of law is the secret of beauty in form, 
and would rejoice with the joy of the artist in obedi- 
ence to its commands. No, it was not Emerson 
whose intellect was narrow. Beholding his exultant 
journey through the various regions dominated by 
man's imagination, in his hand the wand of recon- 
cilement we can think only of the concluding stanzas 
in his poem The Sphinx : 

Up rose the merry Sphinx, 

And crouched no more in stone; 
She melted into purple cloud, 

She silvered in the moon; 
She spired into a yellow flame; 

She flowered in blossoms red; 
She flowed into a foaming wave; 

She stood Monadnoc's head. 

Thorough a thousand voices 

Spoke the universal dame: 
Who telleth one of my meanings, 

Is master of all I am. 

Critics of Emerson from within the pale of organ- 
ised Christianity have found him unappreciative of the 
significance of the Christian message ; inconsistent ' 



54 IRalpb Malbo Cmereon^ 

in his estimates of Christ ; and limited in his 
religious influence by the " vagueness" of his doc- 
trines. None of these charges is thoroughly well- 
founded. His appreciation of Christianity is positive 
though not exclusive. As a very young man he 
wrote to his aunt 'Mt is certain that the moral world, 
as it exists to the man within the breast, is illus- 
trated, interpreted, defined by the positive institutions 
that exist in the world ; that in the aspect disclosed 
to a mind in this hour opening in these parts of the 
earth, Christianity appears the priest, the expounder 
of God's moral law. It is plainly a fit representative 
of the Law-giver." 

In a sermon delivered from the pulpit he had 
renounced as a permanent abiding place, he said : 
''The perspective of time, as it sets everything in the 
right view, does the same by Christianity. We learn 
to look at it now as a part of the history of the world ; 
to see how it rests on the broad basis of man's moral 
nature, but is not itself that basis. . . . Christ- 
ianity is the most emphatic affirmation of spiritual 
nature. But it is not the only nor the last affirma- 
tion. There shall be a thousand more. Very incon- 
sistent would it be with a soul so possessed with the 
love of the real and the unseen as Christ's to set 
bounds to that illimitable ocean. He never said : 
' All truth have I revealed.' He plainly affirms the 
direct contrary : ' I will send you another Teacher, 
another Comforter, even the Spirit of truth ; he will 
guide you into all truth.' " 



IReligiom 55 

It seems a late day at which to point out that Em- 
erson's extraordinary perception of the value in re- 
ligions that have influenced innumerable believers 
toward excellence of life, does not diminish the im- 
portance of the tribute he pays to Christianity and 
Christ. It is almost superfluous to add that his repe- 
titions of the truths of Christianity in his own care- 
fully chosen language do not indicate indifference to 
their source so much as appreciation of their unlim- 
ited application. The defence of his opinions and 
mental attitude toward religion has indeed the colour 
of impertinence in a generation which gratefully has 
accepted his contribution to spiritual happiness, and 
none of his doctrines, vague or definite as they may 
appear to individual critics, more deeply touches the 
heart of the present age than his determined consider- 
ation of happiness raised to its highest power as the 
final good of the soul. He early declared himself like 
Milton ''enamoured of moral perfection" and pas- 
sionately affirmed that it had separated him from 
men, had watered his pillow and driven sleep from 
his bed, had tortured him for his guilt and had in- 
spired him with hope. To show that its reward lay 
in the exquisite delight of the soul was the work of his 
life. What has crudely been called his '' shallow " or 
his ''ineffectual" optimism is widely removed from 
blind cheerfulness. It is the joy of the spiritual artist 
who perceives the harmonies of the universe behind 
its accidental traits, and he has done more than any 
of his contemporaries to elevate the minds of his 



56 



IRalpb Malbo lemereon. 



followers to a plane from which they can perceive large 
moral forces working toward great ends. Of his re- 
ligious influence, using the words in the sense most 
appropriate to his breadth of view, nothing more de- 
scriptive can be said than is embodied in the Seventh 
Grace of the ideal Buddhist Recluse : *' He exhales 
the most excellent and unequalled sweet savour of 
righteousness of life." 




CHAPTER IV. 
NATURE. 

EARLY in 183 1 Emerson's young wife had died, 
and immediately after the severing of his 
bonds with the church his heaUh so much 
declined as to necessitate a European trip for its bet- 
terment. He went in the winter season, in a little 
trading brig, and met the various life of the ancient 
towns to which his rough boat brought him with 
sad indifference. The cathedrals only seem to have 
stirred his love of beauty and they prompted him 
to record his hope that the end of the century would 
find in New England carving and colour and inscrip- 
tion on the walls of the great churches that surely 
must arise there. 

He went first to Sicily,thence to Naples and Rome, 
Florence and Venice, and later to London by way of 
Paris, to Edinburgh and the home of Carlyle. He 
was not sure that he grew '' much wiser or any bet- 
ter " for his travels, but he returned with health re- 
stored, and began at once to plan and work upon his 

slow-growing book Nature. |The title he chose with 

57 



58 IRalpb Malbo lemerson. 

reference to its most comprehensive meaning, and the 
text contains chiefly reflection upon Nature as sym- 
bolic of spirit. It was thus, certainly, that he most 
often thought of it in his constant interrogation of the 
visible world for suggestions of the unseen. \ His 
aunt had long before directed him to the woods and 
to the mountains as the sacred places in which God 
most freely spoke to man ; but not until he had 
reached his full maturity did he turn spontaneously 
to country solitudes for his inspiration. Then, at last, 
the gracious beauty of hill and sky and sweet wild 
growth took possession of his consciousness, and 
held for him poetic interest. His relations to Nature 
became intimate, not as Thoreau's were, through ex- 
amination of minute appearances, but in perhaps a 
deeper sense through the kinship he felt with forms 
of creation governed by the same laws that ruled his 
own activities. 

It was supremely characteristic that among the 
opulent impressions provided by the fervent summers 
and heroic winters of New England none was more 
constant or compelling than that made by the stars 
in their courses. In the mysterious and visionary 
heavens these shining bodies, aloof and splendid, 
stood to him for revelation of the eternal light by 
which he guided his footsteps. His book of Nature 
opens with an eloquent apostrophe to them. 

'Mf a man would be alone let him look at the 
stars. The rays that come from those heavenly 
worlds will separate between him and what he 



IRature- 59 

touches. One might think the atmosphere was 
made transparent with this design, to give man, in 
the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the 
sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great 
they are ! If the stars should appear one night in a 
thousand years, how would men believe and adore ; 
and preserve for many generations the remembrance 
of the city of God which had been shown ! But 
every night come out these envoys of beauty and 
light the Universe with their admonishing smile." 
Through his later writings also the wide sky and the 
clear radiance of the planets lend their singular exal- 
tation to his expression of himself. To *' Intel- 
lect " he says : 

Go, speed the stars of Thought 
On to their shining goals. 

The man of character he sees beneath the open 
heaven — 

Stars rose; his faith was earlier up: 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye. 

In the Adirondack wilderness he finds a '' melan- 
choly better than all mirth " watching the changing 
skies. 

And that no day of life may lack romance, 
The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down 
A private beam into each several heart. 

Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home. 



6o IRalpb IKHalbo lEmereon. 

When Monadnoc speaks it lifts the mind toward 
the celestial roof above its towering head, and thus 
determines the accomplishment of the coming pil- 
grim : 

I will give my son to eat 

Best of Pan's immortal meat, 

Bread to eat, and juice to drain ; 

So the coinage of his brain 

Shall not be forms of stars, but stars. 

Not pictures pale, but Jove and Mars. 

In looking upon any landscape far or near, the 
*' point of astonishment " seems to him the meeting of 
the sky and earth '* which may be seen from the 
first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghan- 
ies." Why, indeed, should man travel when '*the 
stars at night stoop down over the brownest, home- 
liest common, with all the spiritual magnificence 
which they shed on the Campagna or on the marble 
deserts of Egypt " ? 

Mourning for his son, he cries in extreme misery; 

For this losing is true dying ; 
This is lordly man's down-lying, 
This his slow but sure reclining, 
Star by star his world resigning, 

and later rebukes his individual longing with the 
austere question. 

Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow, 
Whose streams through Nature circling go? 
Nail the wild star to its track 
On the half-climbed Zodiac ? 



IRature* 6i 

And in the wild exultant poem which he calls 
The Dcemonic Love there is the most impressive pic- 
ture of any, strangely revealing the effect on the 
mind of wonder flowing from the mysteries of the 
natural world : 

Unknown, albeit lying near 

To men, the path to the Daemon sphere; 

And they that swiftly come and go 

Leave no track on the heavenly snow. 

Sometimes the airy synod bends, 

And the mighty choir descends, 

And the brains of men thenceforth, 

In crowded and in still resorts, 

Teem with unwonted thoughts: 

As, when a shower of meteors 

Cross the orbit of the earth. 

And, lit by fringent air, 

Blaze near and far, 

Mortals deem the planets bright 

Have slipped their sacred bars, 
And the lone seaman all the night 

Sails, astonished, amid stars. 

For accidental Nature, picturesque nooks, local 
scenes, momentary effects, Emerson had little care. 
He looked upon the landscape as he looked upon 
persons and characteristics with his mind fixed upon 
the whole of which the particular object of his regard 
formed a part. Here again he worked as an artist, 
an artist who, had his medium been pigment, fre- 
quently would have painted Nature in moods akin to 
those of Corot and Daubigny, revealing her serene 
and large significance, sensible of her charms, but 
interpreting them with a certain severity, a climbing 



x 



62 IRalpb Walbo iBmcvBon. 



I, 



aspiration toward the upper regions of truth. I In 
many ways he suggests Corot, his native elegance 
of style, the distinction of his images, his piercing 
individuality united to his generalising vision, his 
fusion of colour in a serene grey harmony from which 
the sense of colour is never absent, his blithe exalta- 
tion in the presence of natural objects, all these bring 
to mind the pictures of the great humble master of 
French landscape, seeking his foreground in a distance, 
far enough removed to yield a true perspective. 

Only an indifferent reader could assume, however, 
that Emerson, because he saw broadly, was inaccur- 
ate in his seeing. To read one of his more localised 
descriptive poems is to live for an hour among the 
sights and sounds of the country, precisely and ten- 
derly realised.! The whole poem Musketaqtiid, for 
example, is filled with such clear and delicate im- 
agery as appears in the following lines : 

For me in showers, in sweeping showers, the spring 

Visits the valley; — break away the clouds, — 

I bathe in the morn's soft and silvered air, 

And loiter willing by yon loitering stream; 

Sparrows far off, and nearer, April's bird, 

Blue-coated — flying before from tree to tree, 

Courageous sing a delicate overture 

To lead the tardy concert of the year. 

Onward and nearer rides the sun of May; 

And wide around, the marriage of the plants 

Is sweetly solemnised. Then flows amain 

The surge of summer's beauty; dell and crag, 

Hollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade, 

Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliflF 

Has thousand faces in a thousand hours. 



mature* 63 

iNearly all the poems have touches of landscape, 
bright and lovely or dusky and haunting, or some- 
times buoyantly conceived in symbolic dress, and in- 
formed with the genius of antiquity.! To this last 
group belongs such a Botticelli drawing as this from 
May-Day, 

I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth, 

Stepping daily onward north 

To greet staid ancient cavaliers 

Filing single in stately train. 

And who and who are the travellers ? 

They were Night and Day, and Day and Night, 

Pilgrims wight with step forthright. 

I saw the Days deformed and low, 

Short and bent by cold and snow 

The merry Spring threw wreaths on them. 

Nothing could be less like the conventional figure 
of spring in modern poetry. The youth of the sea- 
son is there, but in the bright free dress of the an- 
cient past ; such an image as that of Pallas taming 
the Satyr, lusty-limbed and powerful beneath the 
languid grace and frailty of line drooping about 
her like a clinging garment. One could almost be- 
lieve that in the poet's plain New England frame 
abode the ghosts of the early Italians and earlier 
Greeks who saw nature with such frank eyes and 
subtle minds. These are the moments when Emer- 
son yielding his spirit to intuitive pre-occupations is 
most himself, most different from all who surrounded 
him, taught him, or learned of him. Reading him in 
his mood of unchastened splendour, when his power 



64 IRalpb TKIlalbo lemerson^ 

to create forms of pure loveliness unites with his 
ethical purpose, it is possible to believe him one of 
the original few belonging to no time or place, but to 
eternal history. His hand moulds what his mind 
evokes with the spontaneous impulse of the maker. 
But it is quite alone with Nature that he attains his 
loftiest peak. How wearily he drops to earth in com- 
pany is plainly written on the surface of the Adiron- 
dack journal, a poetic record of a camping expedition 
led by W. J. Stillman, with such inspiring associates 
as Agassiz and Lowell and others of distinctive intel- 
lectual quality. With them journeyed Emerson to 
the wilderness which was not wilderness enow 
to his exacting faculty. His commemorative poem 
teems with the images made familiar by scores of 
writers upon nature. We hear of the trees of the 
forest not as mysterious singers rehearsing runes 
which come from the heart of the universe, but as 
conifers, five-leaved, three-leaved, and two-leaved ; 
one fifteen feet, one eight feet in girth. We hear of 
plants sought by the botanist, orchis and gen- 
tain, whip-scirpus, rosy polygonum, hypnum, and 
hydnum, and of birds belonging to the place, the 
eagle, osprey, raven, woodpecker, and heron ; of 
lizard, salamander, shrew, dragon-fiy, minnow, and 
moth, and of the lusty occupations that engage ama- 
teur woodsmen. The seer is ploughing contentedly 
in harness, subduing his interrogative mind to the 
objects of his companions' curiosity. 

His watchfulness to discern the spiritual causes of 



Iftature* 65 

what he felt, to gain some hint of the undiscoverable 
secret beneath the mask of things was apparent to 
Mr. Stillman in the Adirondack poem as in no other 
of his works, but to the reader excluded from per- 
sonal share in the agreeable experience, and judging 
only by the reflection in the poem itself it is signifi- 
cant chiefly as showing the power of society to 
quench fires lighted in solitude. 

In his autobiography Mr. Stillman gives an inci- 
dent of Emerson's life in camp illustrating how far the 
apostle of forbearance was swung out of his orbit by 
his intimate contact with new activities and interests. 
At the outset of the expedition he had with some re- 
luctance purchased a rifle in honour of conformity, 
an act that restrained the sceptical Longfellow from 
joining the company. When the day of the hunt 
arrived he who had named the birds without a gun 
yielded to the potent influence of '' mob fury," and 
announced that he must understand this passion to 
kill, and at night he went out jack-hunting in pursuit 
of the alien knowledge. 

Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds 
Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist. 

Utterly unable to see anything resembling a deer 
when the signal to shoot was given, he refrained until 
the lucky animal took fright and ran, snorting scorn of 
his inefficient enemy. Emerson found no other oppor- 
tunity for deer-hunting and was obliged to renounce 
his momentary ambition to become a red-slayer. 



66 IRalpb Malbo jemereon* 

His defeat was characteristic. No man more intelli- 
gently admired skill of hand and fitness to meet the 
practical conditions of life. He respected the farmer 
''deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, 
and timely," the '' continuous benefactor" ; he bade 
''men of cloth" bow to "the stalwart churls in over- 
alls" ; he praised the "all round" New England lad 
who " teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, 
preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys 
a township, and so forth "; but of this ability to per- 
form the plain crude task he had the smallest possible 
measure. A spade in his hand was an instrument of 
torture, and he was helpless in the presence of an 
arable plot of ground calling for the humble craft of 
an ordinary gardener. " The genius of reading and 
gardening," he declares, "are antagonistic," and his 
experience taught him to meddle with no problems 
of the soil. His description of the havoc wrought by 
a stroll about his limited estate has reached the heart 
of many a bookish recluse acquainted with the 
strange seizures that drive pen-weary fingers to delv- 
ing in the good brown earth at irregular and un- 
studied intervals. 

" With brow bent, with firm intent,the pale scholar 
leaves his desk to draw a freer breath and get a just- 
er statement of his thought, in the garden-walk. He 
stoops to pull up a purslain or a dock that is choking 
the young corn, and finds there are two ; close be- 
hind the last is a third ; he reaches out his hand to a 
fourth, behind that are four thousand and one. He 



IRature* 67 

is heated and untuned, and by and by wakes up 
from his idiot dream of chickweed and red-root 
to remember his morning thought and to find that 
with his adamantine purposes he has been duped 
by a dandelion." 

^ In Nature Emerson saw the perfect theme for 
scholarship abounding in fresh inspirations, each as 
novel as the moonrise and sunset of the day, and in 
urging American students to turn to these he was 
guiltless of imposing upon them his own method, 
although he led them toward his own ideal. His 
counsel to the young writer suggests that he had in 
mind the life of his friend Thoreau and the swarm of 
nature-lovers who have followed lazily in that pleas- 
ant path. 

'' But go into the forest," he says, ''you shall 
find all new and undescribed. The honking of 
the wild geese flying by night; the thin note 
of the companionable titmouse in the winter 
day; the fall of swarms of flies, in autumn, from 
combats high in the air, pattering down on the 
leaves like rain; the angry hiss of the wood-birds; 
the pine throwing out its pollen for the benefit of 
the next century; the turpentine exuding from the 
tree; — and indeed any vegetation, any animation, 
any and all, are alike unattempted." ^ Such a 
passage reveals what the poet of Brahma might 
have made of nature-study in the narrower sense, 
had he not devoted himself to his larger task. The 

^ Literary Ethics. 



68 IRalpb Mal&o jEmereon^ 

one thing he could never have been is what he 
called " a fop of the fields," and v/hat Carlyle desig- 
nated as a '' view-hunter," self-consciously worship- 
ping and saying to himself: ''Come, let us make a 
description ! " He felt sensitively the obloquy at- 
taching to the sentimentalist on his knees in the 
public field, and acknowledged that, ''ordinarily, 
whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or 
from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write 
on nature, they fall into euphemism " ; but he could 
not renounce the right of returning often to this old 
theme: "The multitude of false churches accredits 
the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the 
homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concern- 
ing which no sane man can affect an indifference or 
incuriosity."^ The genuine man of science he re- 
spected wholly as he respected the poet, but he 
visited his wrathless scorn upon botanisers and nat- 
uralists inspired by no broader aim than arbitrary 
analysis of external characteristics, the young 
scholars who 

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, 
And all their botany is in Latin names. 

Unless they felt, with Linnaeus, in the presence of 
an unfolding blossom that God in His glory was 
passing near them, they were devastators and in- 
vaders worthy of rebuffs by the offended genius of 
the natural world. 

' Essay on Nature. 



IRature* 69 

For scientific research and discovery of the high 
imaginative type he had, as one w^ould expect, the 
most profound admiration. His lines on the laying 
of the first trans- Atlantic cable are exultant: 

Thought's new-found path 
Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways, 
Match God's equator with a zone of art, 
And lift man's public action to a height 
Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses, 
When linked hemispheres attest his deed. * 

All news of such achievement added assurance to 
his belief in the unity between the spiritual and ma- 
terial worlds; and it is interesting to reflect that the 
light in which he saw the universe is the light 
which has shone in the minds of some of the most 
advanced psychologists and philosophers of the 
present day. Late in life John Fiske announced the 
mental state to which his inquiry of scientific facts 
had brought him, and the pages upon which he 
recorded it might have issued with hardly the 
change of a word from the study in which Emer- 
son listened to the voices of the spirit. How truly 
Emersonian, for example, is such a passage as 
this: 

''In getting rid of the Devil and regarding the 
universe as the multiform manifestation of a single 
all-pervading Deity, we become for the first time 
pure and uncompromising monotheists, — believers 
in the ever-living, unchangeable, and all-wise Heav- 

* The Adirondacks. 



70 IRalpb HClal&o lEmer^on. 

enly Father, in whom we may declare our trust 
without the faintest trace of mental reservation. 

'' If we can truly take such a position, and hold 
it rationally, it is the modern science so apt to be 
decried by the bats and owls of orthodoxy that just- 
ifies us in doing so. For what is the philosophic 
purport of these beautiful and sublime discoveries 
with which the keen insight and patient diligence of 
modern students of science are beginning to be 
rewarded ? What is the lesson that is taught alike by 
the correlation of forces, by spectrum analysis, by 
the revelations of chemistry as to the subtle be- 
haviour of molecules inaccessible to the eye of sense, 
by the astronomy that is beginning to sketch the 
physical history of countless suns in the firmament; 
by the palaeontology which is slowly unravelling the 
wonders of past life upon the earth through millions 
of ages ? What is the grand lesson that is taught by 
all this ? It is the lesson of the unity of nature. 
To learn it rightly is to learn that all the things that 
we can see and know, in the course of our life in 
this world, are so intimately woven together that 
nothing could be left out without reducing the 
whole marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else 
may be true, the conviction is brought home to us 
that in all this endless multifariousness there is one 
single principle at work, that all is tending toward 
an end that was involved from the very beginning, 
if one can speak of beginnings and ends where the 
process is eternal. The whole universe is animated 



IRaturc* 71 

by a single principle of life, and whatever we see in it, 
whether to our half-trained understanding and nar- 
row experience it may seem to be good or bad, is an 
indispensable part of the stupendous scheme."^ 

In similar tone and temper Professor Royce has 
recently discussed the spirit of modern philosophy, 
using Emerson's own phraseology as the most 
appropriate expression of his deepest conviction, — 
even while he assures his reader of his independence 
of mystical processes: '' My reason for believing that 
there is one absolute World-Self, who embraces and 
is all reality, whose consciousness includes and in- 
finitely transcends our own, in whose unity all the 
laws of nature and all the mysteries of experience 
must have their solution and their very being, — is 
simply that the profoundest agnosticism which you 
can possibly state in any coherent fashion, the deep- 
est doubt which you can any way formulate about 
the world or the things that are therein, already pre- 
supposes, implies, demands, asserts, the existence 
of such a World-Self. The agnostic, I say, already 
asserts this existence — unconsciously, of course, as 
a rule, but none the less inevitably. For, as we shall 
find, there is no escape from the infinite Self except 
by self-contradiction. Ignorant as 1 am about first 
causes, I am at least clear, therefore, about the Self. 
If you deny him, you already in denying affirm him. 
You reckon ill when you leave him out. Him when 
you fly, he is the wings. He is the doubter and the 

' Through Nature to God. 



72 IRalpb IHHalbo iBmereon. 

doubt. You in vain flee from his presence. The 
wings of the morning will not aid you. Nor do I 
mean this as any longer a sort of mysticism. The 
truth is, I assure you, simply a product of dry logic. 
When I try to tell you about it in detail, I shall 
weary you by my wholly unmystical analysis of 
commonplaces."^ 

Professor Shaler refers to the ** sense of unity with 
the whole of Nature " as '' the largest lesson that the 
naturalist gains from his study of the realm," and 
from it he turns hopefully toward larger lessons and 
happier convictions: ''Looking forward on the path 
on which men are so rapidly advancing, we can dis- 
cern in some part the state to which he is to attain 
when his reconciliation with the Nature about him 
is more completely effected. We can see that the 
meaning of man's organic history is to be borne in 
upon him with such effect as to give him a per- 
spective undreamed of by the ancients. He is to see 
himself as far more truly divine in origin than the 
old ideas of his creation led him to believe.""^ 

When we consider that Emerson came by intui- 
tion to the elementary and stupendous conviction 
beyond which modern science, philosophy, and re- 
ligion have not yet reached, that he happened by 
what some of us would call mere accident upon the 
fortunate opening to his book of thought from which 
all its contents flowed consistently and sponta- 
neously, we can hardly fail to recognise in him one 

' The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, ' The Individual. 



IRature* 7z 

of the inexplicable men, one of the artists born with 
the true vision whose work is happiness because 
its direction is fixed by an inner certainty of right. 
Maeterlinck warns us that the poet privileged to form 
hypotheses and to forge his way ahead of reality 
often finds that when he imagines himself to be far 
in advance, he will have done no more than turn in 
a circle. Such was not Emerson's experience. If 
the minds most loyally devoted to study of the 
knowable find in him inspiration, and can still say, 
with Professor Tyndall, that he is a profoundly re- 
ligous influence in the supreme sense of the word, 
it is because he was such a poet as he has him- 
self described : *' a beholder of ideas, and an utterer 
of the necessary and causal." To call him original 
conveys to the conventional understanding a false 
impression since he uttered truth which from time to 
' time has enlightened the souls of men in all parts 
of the world. But he was fundamental; and it is 
merely recognising his universal quality flowering in 
the delicately austere environment of New England 
thought to class him with the artists who stand 
alone, ''the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody." 
His most acute American critic, George Willis 
Cooke, expresses his attitude toward all local phe- 
nomena when he describes his feeling for Concord 
as having no special significance. ''Concord had 
beauties of its own, but Concord was a part of the 
universe. It was worthy of study because repre- 
sentative of the whole; it was the whole for which 



74 IRalpb Malbo lEmeraon. 

he sought, the universal for which he yearned. 
Concord was no Mecca to him; he saw no special 
sacredness in its flowers, rivers, and ponds." Yet 
there was no virtue of the pleasant town where his 
forefathers had lived, and where, after his second 
marriage, he made his home, that he did not grate- 
fully acknowledge. His house was on the outskirts 
of the village, with ample space about it, and his 
walks in the neighbouring fields and pastures gave 
him the ordered and invigorating joy which inter- 
preters of Nature find in her large and simple aspects. 
Other writers have made the sky and friendly land- 
scape in that delectable region familiar to us in all its 
homely and lovable detail, but our imagination is 
seldom roused as by Emerson's poetic interpretations 
of it, into which the impressions of the actual world 
fell like summer rain, '' copious but not troublesome 
to his invulnerable essence." We see his most 
characteristic relation to Nature in the poem on 
Monadnoc Afar, which he left unprinted: 

Dark flower of Cheshire garden, 

Red evening duly dyes 
Thy sombre head with rosy hues 

To fix far-gazing eyes. 
Well the Planter knew how strongly 

Works thy form on human thought; 
I muse what secret purpose had he 

To draw all fancies to this spot. 

In that octave of brief lines and Saxon words we 
have the very colour and genius of his art; its sensi- 



mature* 



75 



tive response to the loveliness of visible things, its 
preoccupation with the message of the invisible. 
The secret of his influence is revealed in every poem 
and in every sentence of prose directly addressed to 
the natural world; he increases our sense of capacity 
for illimitable life. 




CHAPTER V. 
CARLYLE. 

WHEN Emerson reached Edinburgh in the 
course of his European trip, he had 
much ado to discover the whereabouts 
of Thomas Carlyle, then roaring unchecked his criti- 
cism of life from a solitary farm among desolate 
heathery hills, unknown as yet to the multitude 
presently to wrangle over his vociferous dithyrambs, 
' ' with clamours dissonant. " Carlyle, however, was 
of more importance to Emerson than Rome or Lon- 
don, and the ''young American from Boston " per- 
severed until he found the ''good, wise, and 
pleasant" youth in Scotland whom he sought. 
The meeting was fortunate. Emerson was wel- 
comed for the homage he brought to the lonely 
Craigenputtock household, and also because the 
Carlyles found him "one of the most lovable crea- 
tures in himself" they had ever looked upon. Em- 
erson in turn was able to record that he had never 
seen more amiableness than was in Carlyle's count- 
enance, and that he loved him for his amiability, a 

grateful comment to remember after the turmoil of 

76 




Wni --ched Edinburgh in the 

11 lb European trip, he had 
much ado to discover the whereabouts 
>l Thomas Carlyle, then roaring unchecked his criti- 
i life from ThOifMs ^O^rtM ^^^^S desolate 
W\\\s,Frhfk.M*^ymilng4)^ c'^t^. skth^ Hiultitude 
^o wrangle over ' '^t^s, 

^ dissonant. ^^^ 

^ tri Fmpr T LOU- 

_yuui]^ rvi! pcl- 

' f . T - J ., and 

J sought. 

n was wel- 

t to the lonely 

' cause the 

St lovable crea- 

, upon. Em- 

' that he had never 

in Carlyle's count- 

-, his amiability, a 

f after the turmoil of 



discussion spent by later critics upon his sick and 
sorry temper. 

At Craigenputtock Emerson stayed over one 
night and *' talked and heard talking to his heart's 
content," then mounted the hill to ''vanish like an 
angel " from the eyes of his host. The friendship 
that grew out of those few hours of walking over 
the wide country, discoursing on the questions that 
interested the two sincere thinkers, was, on Emer- 
son's side at least, a model in the qualities of unself- 
ish devotion, kind forbearance, and wise frankness. 
It failed to break even under the strain of Carlyle's 
plunging humour, to which so many principles held 
sacred by Emerson were entrusted. For the reader 
interested in tracing correspondences and differences 
it is an amusing task to follow the thread of likeness 
in Sartor Resartus, which reached America through 
Fraser's Maga:{ine before it was published there in 
1836, and in the essays and addresses written by 
Emerson in the same decade. 

It is not difficult to find in the first free flowing 
of Carlyle's genius certain general ideas, many of 
them directly imported from Germany, which are 
reproduced with the same frank appropriation in Em- 
erson's early work, to be firmly knit into the fabric 
of his later thought. Originality to both writers 
meant the use of ideas sanctioned by the intuition. 
Neither was careful of sources, and Emerson in par- 
ticular shared the gifts his reading gave him with an 
open liberality that defied criticism. 



78 IRalpb Malbo lEmeraon. 

*M give you fair warning," he wrote to Herman 
Grimm, after reading his Essays, ''that, as I alone in 
America, at this day possess this book of yours, I in- 
tend to use my advantage. 1 advise you to watch 
me narrowly. I think 1 shall reproduce you in lec- 
tures, poems, essays, — whatever I may in these 
months be called to write. 1 have already been 
quoting you a good many times, within a few days, 
and it was plain, nobody knew where 1 became so 
suddenly learned and discerning." 

What he thus sportively confessed he advo- 
cated in his serious writing. ''The brave man quotes 
bravely," he said, but also insisted that one must 
be an inventor to read well; that the mind must be 
braced by other minds to independent thinking, not 
supported in eleemosynary idleness. With his multi- 
tudinous quotation, and his light-hearted indebted- 
ness to nearly every book which he found it worth 
his while to read, he has kept as free as Shakespeare 
from plagiarism in the true sense of that ugly word. 
His transmuting faculty turned to account every 
scrap of science and every generalisation of philo- 
sophy that matched his conception of life, — moral life, 
which was all he recognised as fit for contemplation. 
Carlyle's denouncement of outworn symbols may be 
found throughout Emerson's writings on religion. 
Dependence on character in place of dependence on 
institutions was advocated first stormily by Carlyle, 
and later, tranquilly, by Emerson. Fichte's ideal of 
the Literary Man, sympathetically interpreted by 



Carl^Ie* 79 

Carlyle is a recognisable ancestor of Emerson's ideal 
scholar; such a sentence as "the healthy moral na- 
ture loves Goodness, and without wonder wholly 
lives in it," might have been written by either Emer- 
son or Carlyle; the theory that matter is an expression 
of the world-spirit received from both the immediate 
welcome of the idealistic nature. Neither of them 
explained how he arrived at the conclusions that 
have been the end of so many arguments among the 
saints and sages whose mouths are stopt with dust. 
Neither of them created a philosophy, and nothing 
could be more absurd than to say — as Carlyle un- 
fortunately did say — that Emerson took his ''sys- 
tem " largely from Sartor Resartus and other of 
Carlyle's early writings, ''working it out, however, 
in a way of his own." The way in which he worked 
out such ideas as the two held in common led to the 
substitution of joy in virtue for pain and self-chastise- 
ment, of faith in mankind for exclusive dependence 
upon special men, of love for intolerance, of beauty 
and serenity for energy. 

In the matter of style his independence of Carlyle 
is obvious. He pleaded a defective sense of humour 
in extenuation of his indifference to the heavy wit of 
Sartor Resartus. As a matter of fact, his sense of 
humour was too fine and too exacting to accept 
mannerism and artifice as worthy of the Comic Muse. 
In the playful use of words he was not perhaps facile; 
and he was wisely shy. In private speech his wit 
was not so closely constrained, and some excellent 



8o IRalpb Mal&o lEmerson* 

sayings are quoted from his merrier hours, the best, 
perhaps, a comment inspired by the introduction 
of an uncongenial person: ''Whom God hath put 
asunder, let not man bring together." But on his 
printed page his ideas must wear, as he said, ''their 
Greek coat.*' Superfluity and verbiage were win- 
nowed out of his product as elements of ugliness, 
where to Carlyle they would have presented them- 
selves as instruments of force. 

In the letters for many years exchanged by Emer- 
son and Carlyle after their day at Craigenputtock, 
we find Emerson the warmer and richer of the two 
in expressions of affection. Under the delicate re- 
straint characterising his style here as elsewhere 
burns a quiet ardour that makes easy the reader's 
acceptance of his statement that a new person was a 
great event to him and hindered him from sleep. 
From this new friend he hoped as usual more than 
he realised, but he freed the essence of his sentiment 
from all triviality and exaggeration, and lived with it 
to the end of his days. Lowell speaks of "this 
loyalty of his that can keep warm for half a century," 
and his intercourse with Carlyle covered almost that 
space of time without faltering under the most prac- 
tical of tests. 

His sturdy theory of friendship is suggested in his 
essay on that interesting relation: 

" I wish that friendship should have feet, as well 
as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the 
ground, before it vaults over the moon; ... we 



Carlisle* 8i 

cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too 
fine, and does not substantiate his romance by the 
municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and 
pity. . . . The end of friendship is a commerce 
the most strict and homely that can be joined; more 
strict than any of which we have experience. . . . 
We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and 
offices of man's life and embellish it by courage, wis- 
dom, and unity. It should never fall into something 
usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, 
and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery." 
Many writers have spoken with as much wisdom 
and as gracefully, and it is to the credit of our 
humanity that so many also have rhymed act to 
word and exemplified their teaching in their practice. 
Certainly, however, the ideal advocated has never 
been more sincerely followed than by Emerson him- 
self in this friendship of his own. Nothing could 
more convincingly demonstrate his modesty and 
loyalty, and his willingness to undertake uncon- 
genial labour for the benefit of others than a simple 
enumeration of his efforts, beginning early and last- 
ing long, to promote Carlyle's interests in this 
country. 

Sartor Resartus was first published in America 
in 1836 as an independent volume at the instigation 
of a young engineer named Le-Baron Russell. The 
preface was written by Emerson, and Carlyle found 
it '' such as no kindest friend could have improved." 
In the space of a year and a half the book was 



82 IRalpb IKHal&o Cmerson. 

reported to have sold to the extent of more than 
eleven hundred copies, and someone in talking with 
Emerson remarked that Carlyle's friends might have 
made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor 
themselves instead of leaving it with a bookseller. 
Instantly Emerson arranged to print the French Revo- 
lution in that way, and wrote joyously to Carlyle of 
the details of publication, concluding: 

''Then if so good a book can have a tolerable sale 
(almost contrary to the nature of a good book, 1 
know), 1 shall sustain with great glee the new rela- 
tion of being your banker and attorney." After this, 
nearly every letter contained some allusion to ques- 
tions involved in this " new relation," for which Emer- 
son developed an admirable talent. *'You may be 
assured," he writes, 'M shall on this occasion sum- 
mon to the bargain all the Yankee in my constitution 
and multiply and divide like a lion." 

The book was published on the 25th of December, 
1837, ^nd Emerson counted upon sending his friend 
at least seven hundred dollars as the outcome of a 
year's sales. This sum was exceeded by a number 
of dollars, and Carlyle wrote to his English correspond- 
ents with even more enthusiasm than he betrayed 
in his letters to Emerson, of the comfort it conveyed. 
To Emerson he wrote: *'You have been very brisk 
and helpful in this business of the Revolution Book, 
and 1 give you many thanks and commendations. It 
will be a very brave day when cash actually reaches 
me, no matter what the number of the coins, whether 



Carl^Ie* 83 

seven or seven hundred, out of Yankee-land; and 
strange enough, what is not unlikely, if it be the first 
cash 1 realise for that piece of work, — Angle-land 
continuing still ///solvent to me! "^ And he added a 
bit of rhodomontade to the effect that he was now 
beginning to despise the question of ways and 
means, thus apostrophising poverty in the vein of 
Teufelsdrockh: 

''Thou beggarliest Spectre of Beggary, that hast 
chased me ever since I was man, come on then, in 
the Devil's name, let us see what is in thee! Will 
the Soul of a man, with Eternity within a few years 
of it, quail before thee? " 

When the money did arrive he gave ardent thanks 
to ''the mysterious, all-Bounteous Guide of men" 
and to his ' ' true Brother far over the sea. " The true 
brother, meanwhile, had been turning aside from his 
personal tasks to push through the publication of two 
volumes of Carlyle's Miscellanies, issued on the same 
plan as the history, with reference to the utmost 
benefit to the author. The letters reveal endless at- 
tention to detail on Emerson's part; endless consulta- 
tion with the graceful author (who was not always 
conveniently prompt with his answers), and the exer- 
cise of faculties quite unaccustomed to such arduous 
claims. The first formal account of the costs and 
sales of the French Revolution was forwarded to Car- 
lyle on the 25th of April, 1839, and Emerson wrote 
of it: 

^ The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence. 



84 IRalpb Mal&o JBmcveon. 

''Behold my account! A very simple thing, is it 
not! A very mouse, after such months, almost years, 
of promise! Despise it not, however; for such is my 
extreme dulness at figures and statements that this 
nothing has been a fear to me a long time; how to 
extract it from the bookseller's promiscuous account 
with me and from obscure records of my own."^ 

The little sheet of items and figures, punctiliously 
made up, drew from Carlyle a manly utterance of 
warm feeling. ''A reflection 1 cannot but make," he 
said, 'Ms that at bottom this money was all yours; 
not a penny of it belonged to me by any law except 
that of helpful friendship," and he bids Emerson re- 
joice that, thanks to him and the books, "and to 
Heaven over all," he is for the present no longer poor, 
but has more money in his possession than for a 
dozen years preceding, which, despite his invocation 
to beggary, he found "a blessedness really very 
considerable." 

For six years the making and sifting of book- 
sellers' accounts, and the transmission of varying 
amounts of money accruing from the sales, contin- 
ued without special incident, Carlyle receiving in all 
about two thousand dollars from Emerson's man- 
agement of his affairs. 

Then in the spring of 1843 Carlyle sent to Emer- 
son, in advance of the English publication, his book 
called Past and Present, hoping thus to prevent 
pirated republication in America. Emerson was 

' The Carlyle-Evierson Correspondence. 



Carl?le* 85 

obliged to report an evil condition of the book mar- 
ket, brought about within a few months by the 
cheap press. " Every English book of any name or 
credit," he wrote, " is instantly converted into a 
newspaper or coarse pamphlet, and hawked by a 
hundred boys in the streets of all our cities for 25, 
18, or 12 cents; Dickens's Notes for 12 cents, Black- 
wood's Magazine for 18 cents, and so on." 

His energy arose, however, to meet the new de- 
mand upon it, and, with much sagacity, after ''per- 
plexing debate with the booksellers," he made 
arrangements, first with one firm and then with 
another, still sending Carlyle occasional remittances, 
amounting in three years to something less than 
five hundred dollars. Finally, in 1846, he made 
what seemed to Carlyle ''the best of Bargains" 
with the firm of Wiley & Putnam, who agreed to 
pay a certain royalty on all the works of Carlyle 
which they were free to publish, much to Emerson's 
relief, it may be supposed. References to accounts 
and remittances now drop out of the correspondence, 
with Emerson's valour thoroughly proven. And it 
should be added that Carlyle, also, had shown some 
activity in the republication of Emerson's Essays in 
England, which was not, however, due to his own 
impulse, but sprang from the suggestion of Eraser, 
his publisher. 

There is little of Emerson's genius in his cor- 
respondence with Carlyle; but of his character, which 
was the positive basis of his genius, there is much. 



86 IRalpb Malbo lemereon. 

His mild breadth of vision, his excellence of temper, 
and his freedom from egoistic absorption in his af- 
fairs diffuse a soft radiance of personality in contrast 
with the fitful gleam and shadow of Carlyle's uncer- 
tain humour; and the warmth of his nature is more 
apparent in these letters than in any others accessible 
to the public. A curious strain of tenderness mingled 
with reverence shows itself in all his phrases, some- 
what studied and elaborate in form, but breathing 
pure sincerity. For many years he sent reiterated 
invitations and appeals to Carlyle to come with 
his wife to America and find a home in the Em- 
erson household. The advantages offered by the 
New England institution called the ''Lyceum" he 
thought peculiarly adapted to Carlyle's needs, as 
to his own, the lecture being a substitute for the ser- 
mon as flexible as the heart of either could desire. 
Deducing from his personal experience, he wrote : 

''The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an 
obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of 
those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much 
from that of those under it, as to embarrass the con- 
science of the speaker, because so much is attributed 
to him from the fact of standing there. In the Ly- 
ceum nothing is presupposed. The orator is only re- 
sponsible for what his lips articulate. Then, what 
scope it allows! You may handle every member and 
relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates, 
or St. Paul say that cannot be said here ? The audi- 
ence is of all classes, and its character will be deter- 



Carlple* 87 

mined always by the name of the lecturer. Why 
may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, 
your philosophy, and become that good despot which 
the virtuous orator is ? " ^ 

Nor did he forget to add to his list of the Lyceum's 
virtues the worldly profit to be extracted from it ; 
and again he multiplied and divided '' like a lion," in 
order to give Carlyle an accurate impression of the 
outgo and income to be expected from a lecturing 
tour in America. ''You may board in Boston in a 
' gigmanic ' style for $8 per week, including all do- 
mestic expenses," he wrote in 1835. '* Eight dollars 
per week is the board paid by the permanent resi- 
dents at the Tremont House,— probably the best 
hotel in North America. There and at the best 
hotels in New York, the lodger for a few days pays 
at the rate of $1.50 per day." He concluded his 
estimate with the assurance that he had given '' rates 
of expenses where economy is not studied." To the 
present age such a picture of cheapness and oppor- 
tunity, combining suggestions of the ''plain living 
and high thinking, ' since become a byword, brings 
a sense of regret that the cool, clear social atmosphere 
in which spiritual voices had so loud a sound has 
completely passed. In a denser air of more complex 
claims it is possible that the peculiar freshness and 
pungency of Emerson's utterance would have been 
less sustained. He seems in his Essays to dwell in a 
land where there is ample room for the mind to move 

' The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence. 



88 IRalpb Mal&o Cmereom 

without encountering material obstacles to its gen- 
eralisation. He felt the opposite influence in Car- 
lyle's work and defined it with an acute appreciation 
of the sense of mass conveyed by it, a sense in which 
his own writings are so notably lacking. 

'' I thought as 1 read this piece," he said, referring 
to the Diamond Necklace, " that your strange genius 
was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma 
of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is 
this style; so vast, enormous, related to all the 
world, and so endless in details. I think you see as 
pictures every street, church, parliament-house, bar- 
rack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and 
ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims 
thereabouts, and make all your own. Hence, your 
encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the 
virtues and vices of your panoramic pages. Well, it 
is your own; and it is English, and every word stands 
for somewhat, and it cheers and fortifies me."^ 

If Carlyle's genius is the aroma of Babylon, Emer- 
son's is the aroma of Shiloh, where the gentle Eli 
exhorted his people to give over the worship of 
strange gods and to follow the moral law. Carlyle 
found his friend's benign detachment and abstract vis- 
ion unsatisfying, and urged upon him the kind of art 
in which he himself was conspicuously successful. 
*' You tell us with piercing emphasis," he said, *'that 
man's soul is great; show us a great soul of a man in 
some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such 

^ The Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence. 



Carlple. 89 

a message, and you will feel by and by that you are 
called to this. 1 long to see some concrete Thing, 
some Event, Man's Life, American Forest or piece of 
Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, 
well Emersonised, depictured by Emerson, filled with 
the life of Emerson, and cast far from him then to 
live by itself." 

Had Emerson attempted such a task it would 
have been approached in the spirit he brought to his 
orations, and the result might easily have been his- 
tory or biography of the sort that illuminates from 
within, showing the play of moral forces through all 
forms of human energy. It is interesting to conject- 
ure how he would have borne himself among the 
crowding figures of history. In Carlyle's French 
Revolution what he found admirable was the pre- 
sence of humanity. "' We have men in your story," 
he told the author, ''and not names merely; always 
men, though 1 may doubt sometimes whether I have 
the historic men." His affectionate interest was not 
warped into prejudice; he insisted, with sufficient 
moderation surely, that the style might be ''more 
simple, less Gothically efflorescent." "You will 
say," he added, "no rules for the illumination of 
windows can apply to the Aurora Borealis. How- 
ever, 1 find refreshment when every now and then a 
special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp 
and business-like terms. This character-drawing in 
the book is certainly admirable, the lines are ploughed 
furrows; but there was cake and ale before though 



90 IRalpb IKHal&o Cmerson* 

thou be virtuous. Clarendon surely drew sharp lines 
for me in Falkland, Hampden, and the rest without 
defiance or sky-vaulting." 

A quarter of a century later the time was past for 
constructive criticism between the two, and concern- 
ing Frederick the Great Emerson had only words of 
soaring congratulation. Even in his journal he de- 
clared it to be '* infinitely the wittiest book that ever 
was written; — a book that one would think the Eng- 
lish people would rise up in mass and thank the au- 
thor for by cordial acclamation." He had, however, 
too much the seeing eye to miss Carlyle's essential 
shortcoming in looking dispassionately at his total 
effect. On his second visit to him, made fourteen 
years after the first, he was able to admire anew, 
and even found himself *' taken by surprise" by 
qualities he had not guessed before. But in his notes, 
with one of his amazing and acute juxtapositions, he 
clearly defined the destructive weakness that under- 
mined the work of strength: 

*' In Carlyle as in Byron, one is more struck with 
the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly 
superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes 
good hard hits all the time. There is more character 
than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly re- 
sembling Samuel Johnson." 

The correspondence lasted until 1872, nine years 
before Carlyle's death, and left the writers almost 
where it found them, both in friendship and in men- 
tal attitude. Each had maintained a gentle courtesy 




I 



i^- 



Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
Samuel Bradford, and William H. Fiirness. 

From a. photograph by Gutekunst, PhiladtJphia, i8ys 



Carlisle, 91 

toward the opinions of the other, tolerating disagree- 
ment with that ''beautiful behaviour" defined by 
Emerson as the finest of the fine arts. Each continued 
to find his friend after many years a fresh delight. 
''I clatter my chains with joy," wrote Emerson on 
the receipt of the last volumes oi Frederick the Great, 
*' as I did forty years ago, at your earliest gifts." Time 
had brought a measure of fame to each, but discern- 
ing critics found Carlyle exhausted by repetition of 
his message and the ever-increasing emphasis laid 
upon it, while Emerson was inexhaustible as a source 
of mental cheer, so perfect had been the harmony 
of his development and the unity of his conception. 
Carlyle's belief in human nature, at first apparent 
through his exaggerated denunciation, had waned 
and given way to what Lowell called a deep disdain, 
but what perhaps was more truly a perverse ignor- 
ance of universal human qualities, and a growing, 
dark despair of moral improvement in mankind. 
''Alas! then," he wrote in the French Revolution, 
"is man's civilisation only a wrappage, through which 
the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as 
ever? Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal 
in her as well as a Celestial." The Infernal became 
continually clearer to his vision, and the Celestial 
more clouded to his infrequent upward glance. The 
pessimism threatening his capacity for lasting service 
at the outset of his course had become deepened and 
fixed by the time he reached its end, and he passed 
out of life like a spent torch which, bravely as it had 



« • 



92 1?alpb Mal&o JEmereon* 

burned and flashed, had failed to light one of the 
inextinguishable altar-fires kept alive by the faith- 
ful worshippers of goodness. 

With Emerson it was otherwise. His moral 
optimism saw goodness environing the world and 
flowing into every humblest heart held open to it. 
The beauty of holiness revealed itself to him wher- 
ever he looked ; and within himself he found assur- 
ance that in unity with the moral order is gained 
eternal peace beyond the chaos and horror of acci- 
dent and crime. As life enriched him with mild 
experience and the fruit of contemplation, he con- 
sistently studied and taught the comfort of his 
serene faith. '' How dear, how soothing to man, 
arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, 
effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappoint- 
ments." Beside his happy freedom from complaint 
and idle interrogation of insoluble mysteries, such a 
voice as Carlyle's sounds like the noisy whining of 
undisciplined childhood. Yet the two men were at 
one in their love of the truth under formula and 
sham, and the bonds uniting them were recognised 
by both to the last. 




i 



<( 



CHAPTER VI. 
MAN, THE REFORMER." 



DURING the interval between the first and 
second meetings of Carlyle and Emerson 
the life of the latter ran serenely in chan- 
nels that were narrow but deep. He was touched 
by his share of the frost and darkness that recur 
inevitably in normal human experience. His home 
in Concord had been planned for the inclusion of his 
brother Charles in his family, but before it was in 
order Charles had died, leaving Emerson a mourner. 

*'You must be content henceforth with only a 
a piece of your husband," he wrote to his wife, " for 
the best of his strength lay in the soul with which 
he must no more on earth take counsel." 

In 1 84 1 he lost his eldest boy, and readers of 
the Threnody know to what noble uses he turned 
his grief. His work, after he left the pulpit of the 
Second Church, continued to be that of an ethical 
teacher, but he was oftener on the lecture platform 
than in the pulpit. 

"You cannot preach to people unless they will 

93 



94 IRalpb XKHal&o lemereon* 

hear," he wrote to his brother William, and in his 
earlier lectures he even abandoned what he called 
his ''ethics and theologies" for natural history, 
which gave him admirable illustrations of his un- 
alterable theory of the unity in nature. As early as 
1833, immediately after his return from Europe, he 
gave an address before the Natural History Society, 
in which, as in his later writings, he showed his 
striking appreciation of the larger scientific spirit. 
'' As books can never teach the use of books, neither 
does science, when it becomes technical, keep its 
own place in the mind." Its place in the mind was 
what he never forgot or misunderstood. 

For about three years he supplied the pulpit at 
East Lexington, near Concord, and for a longer time 
he continued to preach occasionally to hearers will- 
ing to accept him on his own terms of doctrine and 
without question. Obviously he longed to move 
men's hearts from, the place of prophecy and worship 
to which he had been dedicated. It is impossible to 
think of him as without susceptibility to the beauty 
and lovable quality of the institutions he was 
forced by his conscience to renounce. Unity, too, 
for which he had such constant concern, must have 
seemed to him a treasurable element in religious 
worship, even while he sacrificed to individuality of 
judgment. But the great thing was to speak truth, 
and this he could do most freely from the Lyceum, 
the praises of which he had sung to Carlyle. 

In 1840 he wrote in his journal that in all his lee- 



1 



it 



flDan, tbe IReformer/' 95 



tures he had taught one doctrine, the infinitude of 
the private man, to find this readily accepted, "even 
with loud commendation," so long as he called 
the lecture Art, or Politics, or Literature, or the 
Household, but that as soon as he called it Religion 
everyone was shocked, although it was only the 
application of the same truth to a new class of facts. 
His lectures were certainly received with growing 
enthusiasm, Lowell writing of the Phi Beta Kappa 
speech in 1837, that it was ''an event without 
any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene 
always to be treasured in the memory for its pictur- 
esqueness and its inspiration." It is not now easy to 
realise the ''enthusiasm of approval " or the "grim 
silence of foregone dissent " in the listeners crowding 
the aisles and clustering at the windows. Neither is 
it easy to understand the academic point of view that 
was startled by the homely allusions to "the meal 
in the firkin, the milk in the pan." The address 
contains nothing startling to the mind of the present 
day, and the amount of shock it conveyed to its 
audience measures with considerable approach to 
accuracy the change that has taken place in the 
American point of view in the last seventy years. 
The young lecturer told the breathless auditors that 
life and action are more necessary than books to the 
true scholar, that the scholar should trust himself 
and go down into the secrets of his own mind to 
learn the secrets of all minds, that he should not let 
himself be influenced even by genius and should 



96 IRalpb IKHalbo j£mer9om 

read for inspiration rather than guidance, that the 
common, the familiar, and the low are as worthy of 
exploration as the antique and the remote ; that 
Americans are weakened and intimidated by listen- 
ing to the courtly Muses of Europe, and that the true 
office of the American scholar is to walk on his own 
feet, work with his own hands, and speak his own 
mind. Broadly interpreted, this teaching has many 
elements and features in common with Matthew 
Arnold's teaching to his countrymen on the absorb- 
ing subject of culture, superficially opposed as the 
two doctrines appear. 

Perfection resides in an ''inward condition of 
the mind and spirit and not in an outward set of 
circumstances," Arnold proclaims almost in Emer- 
son's words. We must attain this perfection by 
getting to know ''on all matters which most 
concern us, the best which has been known and 
thought in the world ; and through this knowledge, 
turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our 
stock notions and habits which we now follow 
stanchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that 
there is a virtue in following them stanchly which 
makes up for the mischief of following them me- 
chanically." The subtle humour of this is not 
Emerson's, but the thought was among his most 
cherished convictions. And the idea of culture as 
the harmonious development of all the powers for 
beauty and for the benefit of human nature is at one 
with Emerson's theory of individual development. 



u 



flDan, tbe IRcformer/' 97 



The scholar in the end is ''one who raises himself 
from private considerations, and breathes and lives 
on public and illustrious thoughts." But Emer- 
son adjures the young scholar of America to turn 
away from European standards and trust his in- 
stincts, and Arnold urges Englishmen to listen to 
the criticism of foreigners. Both were conforming to 
Arnold's belief that ''the real unum necessarium for 
us is to come to our best at all points." This was 
what he with his discussion of "Hebraism" and 
"Hellenism" was aiming at, and this was equally 
the aim of Emerson's warnings and entreaties. Each 
held fast to the great assumption that culture in- 
volves the co-operation of the moral with the intel- 
lectual sense. Each spoke to the inner need of his 
public, and to each that public "came round" as 
Emerson predicted, with the slow swing of the 
aggregate mind. 

Arnold could not address Emerson's counsel, 
" Trust thyself " to the common Englishman of his 
time who, together with the common American, 
was, he thought, more than enough disposed al- 
ready to trust himself, but he was quite ready to tell 
us that we could not heed Emerson too diligently or 
prize him enough when he spoke of the happiness 
eternally attached to the true life in the spirit. And 
he recognised the double lesson to be learned from 
his teaching, the lesson for England, and the lesson 
for America : "To us," he said in his American lec- 
ture on Emerson, "to us he shows for guidance his 



98 IRalpb HClalbo lEmereon. 

lucid freedom, his cheerfulness and hope; to you 
his dignity, delicacy, serenity, elevation." None of 
these qualities was absent from the oration which 
Doctor Holmes somewhat conventionally called 
''our intellectual Declaration of Independence." 

The year following the Phi Beta Kappa speech 
came the Divinity School Address, and during the 
intervening months ten lectures were delivered in 
the form of a series under the title oi Human Cul- 
ture. Parts of these lectures appeared later in the 
Essays which were sent out as separate papers on 
subjects more or less connected with an ethical in- 
tention, but without any outward suggestion of unity. 
Emerson would perhaps have cast additional light on 
his attitude of mind for the general reader had he 
retained for the Essays the title of the lecture series 
and thus emphasised the idea of an inclusive culture, 
drawing from all forms of human activity; '' a disci- 
pline so universal as to demonstrate that no part of 
a man was made in vain." It was the idea of a con- 
structive thinker, and Emerson's service in construct- 
ive criticism of life is frequently underestimated. 

In the essay on Heroism, which probably is almost 
identical with the lecture of that title, we find little 
of hero-worship in the sentimental sense of the 
word. For a young man, recently engaged in oppos- 
ing public opinion at the peril of his own interests, 
Emerson looked with extraordinary detachment upon 
the quality he illustrated. Nothing is more com- 
mon than to see men drunk with the virtue they are 



u 



fIDan, tbe IReformcr/' 99 



practising, and unwilling to give it less than the high- 
est and most pompous place in the list of divine 
attributes. What, then, could be more refreshing 
than Emerson's description of the heroic class. 

'* Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. 
The great will not condescend to take anything seri- 
ously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, 
though it were the building of cities or the eradica- 
tion of old and foolish churches and nations which 
have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. 
Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this 
world behind them, and play their own game in 
innocent defiance of the Blue Laws of the world; and 
such would appear, could we see the human race 
assembled in vision, like little children frolicking 
together, though to the eyes of mankind at large 
they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and 
influences." 

According to the custom already fixed by Emer- 
son, the abstract idea of heroism in the lecture was 
presented in a generalised form. There was one 
pointed exception, however, that of Elijah Lovejoy's 
then recent martyrdom. Lovejoy was a Presby- 
terian minister, and editor of the St. Louis Observer 
through which he strove to awaken public sentiment 
to the evils of slavery. He was driven from St. 
Louis to Alton, Illinois, where he again established 
a paper and continued his anti-slavery work. Three 
of his presses were destroyed, and he was requested 
by the citizens of Alton to retire from the charge of 



.LofC. 



loo IRalpb Mal&o lEmereon. 

his paper. This he refused to do, and ordered a 
new press. Upon its arrival a mob gathered and 
demanded it. Lovejoy and a small band of sup- 
porters were attacked and Lovejoy was shot dead. 

Emerson evidently felt that this was a time to 
bring home to his hearers the practical application of 
his doctrines, and it is told of him that toward the 
end of his lecture, his audience thrilling to his ac- 
count of heroism in other lands and ancient times, 
he looked steadily down into their eyes with a signi- 
ficant gravity, and reminded them of their own 
hero. '' It was but the other day that the brave 
Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for 
the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when 
it was better not to live." 

The end of the lecture is touched by the sadness 
of premonition, and it is not impossible that Emer- 
son's clear mind was already discerning the calamity 
of civil strife a quarter of a century in the future. 
His sturdy optimism bent for a moment beneath the 
innate melancholy of the human heart reviewing 
human destiny: 

'' In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, 
in the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, 
who does not envy those who have seen safely to 
an end their manful endeavour ? Who that sees 
the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates 
Washington that he is long already wrapped in his 
shroud, and for ever safe ; that he was laid sweet in 
his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated 



i 



'' fIDan, tbe IRef ormer/' i o i 

in him ? Who does not sometimes envy the good 
and brave who are no more to suffer from the 
tumults of the natural world, and await with curious 
complacency the speedy term of his own conver- 
sation with finite nature ? And yet the love that 
will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has 
already made death impossible, and affirms itself no 
mortal but a native of the deeps of absolute and 
inextinguishable being." 

After the controversy caused by the Divinity 
School Address, Emerson expected small audiences 
for his lectures, but his next course, on the broad 
subject of Human Life, was largely attended. In 
1840 and 1 84 1 he was too much occupied with 
getting out his volume of Essays and with the pro- 
ject of the transcendental magazine called The Dial, 
to undertake regular lecturing. The one lecture 
that he did give, on Man, the Reformer is interesting 
as indicating his temper toward the stirring of dis- 
content with the existing order that pushed its way 
to the surface in New England about this time at so 
many separate points. Although he was fervent 
and early in preaching the reform of the Church and 
of methods of religious worship, he was in no sense 
what is commonly called a professional reformer. 
Fanaticism annoyed him and repelled him, and he 
was quick to observe and analyse the weakness of 
the systems for social regeneration springing up 
about him. None of their follies escaped his kind 
and penetrating gaze. He was a critic but he was 



I02 IRalpb Malbo lemeraon. 

not a contriver. He possessed none of the Yankee 
ingenuity that found its account in making mechan- 
ical toys which would run for a limited space of 
time and attract the attention of the idle world with- 
out winning its respect. Truth only, and personal 
regeneration roused his imagination and compelled 
his faith. Such communities as Brook Farm, in 
which the members attempted to combine agricul- 
ture, scholarship, and art to their common benefit, 
he looked upon with suspicious sympathy as the 
sincere efforts of sincere men to better the world but 
as '* away from his work." He observed that pro- 
fessed philanthropists, ''it is strange and horrible to 
say," are apt to be altogether odious, to be shunned 
as " the worst of bores and ranters." How many of 
them must he have been unable to shun in his hos- 
pitable home at Concord ! The days were brim- 
ming with protests against Church and State, against 
meat -eating and slave - keeping, against drinking 
and against civilised apparel, against the subjection 
of women and against class distinctions. Emerson 
had the same objection to dogmatism in reform, he 
said, as to dogmatism in conservatism, yet he was 
far too conscious of the problem of suffering in the 
world not to respect the class that spent itself fool- 
ishly but honestly on ineffectual schemes for bringing 
about happiness for the masses. 

He felt the pain of the wretched and the poor 
without the frenzy for revolutionary methods 
impelling his warm-hearted and hot-headed com- 



)kee 



ot 
i\- 
uil 
?d 
arm, in 
ombine agricul- 
cholarsi aii lO their common benefit, 

iie looked wiui suspicious sympathy as the 

A sincere men to better the world but 
,' from his work." He observed that pro- 
philanthropists, " it is strange and horrible to 
-ire apt to ifaflm^t^awthorft£^o be shunned 
•x'nr<;t ■■ 'f bf • p^„„; „ ph(itog<-aph. many ot 

the • hos- 

hrim- 

drinking 

ibjection 

Hmerson 

in reform, he 

yet he was 

-ring in the 

that spent itself fool- 

emes for bringing 

^ hed and the poor 
;iutionary methods 
' hot-headed com- 



(( 



flDan, tbe IReformer/' 103 



panions. His way of changing existing conditions 
was by conforming his private life to his ideal. '' I 
think we must clear ourselves, each one," he says, 
''by the interrogation, whether we have earned our 
bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our en- 
ergies to the common benefit ; and we must not 
cease to tend to the correction of flagrant wrongs, 
by laying one stone aright every day." 

This was not wholly the method of the Brook 
Farmers, whose interesting social venture made so 
deep an impression upon their contemporaries, but 
Emerson in his account of the enterprise made ob- 
vious its charm, with the element of childishness 
that both modified and increased it : 

"The Founders of Brook Farm should have 
this praise," he said, "that they made what all 
people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. 
All comers, even the most fastidious, found it the 
pleasantest of residences. It is certain that freedom 
from household routine, variety of character and 
talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought 
and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, mas- 
querade, did not permit sluggishness or despon- 
dency ; broke up routine. There is agreement in 
the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, 
education ; to many, the most important period of 
their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first 
acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their 
training in behaviour. The art of letter writing, it 
is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were 



I04 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon* 

always flying not only from house to house, but 
from room to room. It was a perpetual picnic, a 
French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a 
patty pan." Then he placed his wise finger upon 
the point of weakness: ''People cannot live to- 
gether in any but necessary ways. The only candi- 
dates who will present themselves will be those 
who have tried the experiment of independence and 
ambition, and have failed ; and none others will 
barter for the most comfortable equality the chance 
of superiority. Then all communities have quarrelled. 
Few people can live together on their merits. There 
must be kindred, or mutual economy, or a common 
interest in their business or other external tie." 

Emerson, nevertheless, was sufficiently swayed 
by the general movement of the society with whose 
members he was intimate to attempt one or two 
individual innovations in his own household. There 
was a serious and kindly but wholly ineffective 
attempt to introduce a common table for the family 
and the servants ; an arrangement that would un- 
doubtedly have pleased Emerson who was con- 
stantly oppressed by the personal service of paid 
attendants, and who was always ready to ''respect 
the burden." The servants did not, however, so 
readily yield the independence of their separate 
table and the matter was dropped. It also troubled 
Emerson that his roof sheltered so few people and 
he invited the Alcotts to make their home with him, 
a catastrophe averted by the good sense of Mrs. 



'' flDan, tbe IReformer/' 105 

Alcott. But in the main he was content to fulfil and 
not destroy the law in even the simple matter of 
family organisation. Thoreau he left to his hut, 
Ripley to his farm, without undue expostulation or 
supercilious thanksgiving that he was not as they, 
but with a fixed determination to go his individual 
way according to his individual judgment, which on 
the whole accorded with the judgment of the ma- 
jority in questions of practical living. 

Mr. Burrell Curtis, who with his brother was one of 
the Brook Farm boarders, happily describes Emerson 
as the "sympathising leader and moderating pa- 
tron" of the reforms that sprang about him, although 
the moderation was frequently more conspicuous 
than the leadership. Mr. Curtis looks back to his 
influence as powerful for good in the years between 
1835 and 1842 when the young Curtises were fresh 
from school and ready for high philosophy and lowly 
tasks. '' His large endowment of cheerful humour, 
of intellectual acuteness, and of sober common sense 
did not prevent his holding persistently aloft, in an 
exceptional degree, the torch of the ideal in every- 
thing ; and though his thought was usually charac- 
terised by profundity, comprehensiveness, and severe 
balance, — albeit it was often too fine-spun and 
mystical, — he was so sanguine, and so optimistically 
enamoured of his ideals, as not unfrequently to over- 
look the exorbitancy and impracticability of some of 
them. He was an ardent apostle of 'liberty' even 
to the apparent obeying of one's ' whims' ; but he 



io6 IRalpb Malbo JEmcxBon. 

was an equally ardent and strenuous apostle of 
' law ' in its highest or most stringent senses. 
Nature's law (which includes the moral law) ordains 
liberty also ; and while Emerson stands on the one 
hand stoutly for freedom, independence, self-reliance, 
heroism, nay, even inconsistency and nonconformity — 
he stands on the other hand as piously and im- 
movably, like a rapt saint, for obedience to natural 
and moral law. Our coming into contact with this 
New England 'movement' (called in our time 
'Transcendentalism '), and especially with its leader 
and moderator, proved to be the cardinal event of 
our youth ; and I cannot but think that the seed 
then sown took such deep root as to flower con- 
tinuously in our later years, and make us both the 
confirmed ' Independents ' that we were and are, 
whilst fully conscious at the same time of the obliga- 
tion of living in all possible harmony with our fel- 
lows." This final sentence admirably describes 
Emerson's conscious and unconscious conduct of life. 
The utmost possible independence and ''all possible" 
harmony with his environment formed precisely the 
goal at which he aimed, and which he came as near 
to reaching as anyone whose efforts are recorded. 

In the Lecture on the Times read at the end of 
1 84 1 the subject of reform is again treated and addi- 
tional emphasis laid on its darker aspects. The fol- 
lowing passages show the moderator with his wand 
of leadership held low : 

"The young men who have been vexing society 



'' flDan, tbe IReformer/' 107 

for these last years with regenerative methods seem 
to have made this mistake ; they all exaggerated some 
special means, and all failed to see that the Reform of 
Reforms must be accomplished without means. 

''The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal 
justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. 
They are quickly organised in some low, inadequate 
form, and present no more poetic image to the mind 
than the evil tradition which they reprobated. They 
mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and 
party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the 
blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice 
and truth. Those who are urging with most ardour 
what are called the greatest benefits of mankind, 
are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect 
us as the insane do. They bite us and we run mad 
also. 1 think the work of the reformer as innocent 
as other work that is done around him ; but when 1 
have seen it near I do not like it better. It is done in 
the same way, it is done profanely, not piously ; by 
management, by tactics and clamour. It is a buzz in 
the ear. I cannot feel any pleasure in sacrifices which 
display to me such partiality of character. We do 
not want actions but men ; not a chemical drop of 
water, but rain ; the spirit that sheds and showers 
actions, countless endless actions. . . . Whilst 
therefore I desire to express the respect and joy I feel 
before this sublime connection of reforms now in their 
infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the para- 
mount duties of self-reliance. . . . We say then 



io8 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon. 

that the reforming movement is sacred in its origin ; 
in its management and details timid and profane. 
These benefactors hope to raise man by improving 
his circumstances ; by combination of that which is 
dead they hope to make something alive. In vain. 
By new infusions alone of the spirit by which 
he is made and directed can he be re-made and 
re-inforced." 

In this attitude of mind lies the explanation of 
Emerson's apparent inconsistencies. We find him 
advocating reform and deprecating reforms. In 
writing to a lady who wanted him to assist in 
calling a convention for the purpose of agitating the 
subject of the political rights of women, he said that 
he did not deny the wrongs of women. If they felt 
wronged then they were wronged. But he did not 
like the idea of a public convention called by women, 
nor did he fancy the idea of women wishing for po- 
litical rights, and he imagined that ''a woman whom 
all men would feel to be the best " would decline 
such privileges if they were offered. Yet on account 
of his sympathy with all movements of the mind 
toward individual freedom he allowed his name to be 
used, expressing privately his regret that the occasion 
was a public one. When he was urged to join the 
Brook Farmers, he declared himself an unpromising 
candidate for any society. ''At the name of a so- 
ciety," he said, ''all my repulsions play, all my quills 
rise and sharpen." Yet he wrote in his journal that 
he approved every wild action of the experimenters. 



I 



fi 



flDan, tbe IReformer/' 109 



When he made his first speech on Slavery, in 1837, 
he spoke strongly for the right of free speech, but 
feebly against the sin of slavery. It was not until 
seven years later that his indignation flamed beyond 
the bounds of his earlier judgment. In his address 
on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the 
Negroes in the British West Indies, he depicts the 
submergence of his milder mood by the passion of 
human sympathy. It was not a day to be forgotten 
by those who heard his rich baritone uttering these 
words : 

''Forgive me, fellow-citizens, if I own to you, 
that in the last few days that my attention has been 
occupied with this history, I have not been able to 
read a page of it without the most painful compari- 
sons. Whilst I have read of England, I have thought 
of New England. Whilst I have meditated in my 
solitary walks on the magnanimity of the English 
Bench and Senate, reaching out the benefit of the 
law to the most helpless citizen in her world wide 
realm, I have found myself oppressed by other 
thoughts. As I have walked in the pastures and 
along the edge of the woods, I could not keep my im- 
agination on those agreeable figures, for other im- 
ages that intruded on me. I could not see the great 
vision of the patriots and senators who have adopted 
the slave's cause ; they turned their backs on me. 
No : 1 see other pictures, — of mean men. I see very 
poor, very ill-clothed, very ignorant men, not sur- 
rounded by happy friends, — to be plain, — poor black 



no IRalpb TKIlalbo JEmereon. 

men of obscure employment as mariners, cooks, or 
stewards, in ships, yet citizens of this our Common- 
wealth of Massachusetts, — freeborn as we, — whom 
the slave-laws of the States of South Carolina, Geor- 
gia, and Louisiana have arrested in the vessels in which 
they visited those ports and shut up in jails so long 
as the vessel remained in port, with the stringent ad- 
dition, that if the shipmaster fails to pay the costs of 
this official arrest and the board in jail, these citizens 
are to be sold for slaves to pay that expense. This 
man, these men 1 see, and no law to save them. 
Fellow-citizens this law will not be hushed up any 
longer." 

After this there came in steady sequence Anti- 
Slavery speeches of noble and chivalrous tone. And 
thus it was with all the vital questions of Emerson's 
day. His reserve, his cautious balancing of opposing 
sides, his dislike of haste and of misrule, gave a 
weight to his final judgment that could not have 
been won in any other way. Ultimately he was 
found on the side of all enduring measures for the 
amelioration of evil conditions. The trait to which 
Mr. Sanborn pays eloquent tribute in the little Beacon 
Biography which, within its narrow limits, is the best 
that has been written for Emerson, the trait of 
''instinctive prudence which kept him out of com- 
promising situations, and left so little ground for 
humiliation and vain regrets," is the trait that made 
of him the ideal reformer, in whose hands safely 
could be left the issues of society and government. 



% 



n- 



>•'- 



, ;^..o ^o long 

iic stringent ad- 

iis to pay the costs of 

board in jail, these citizens 

laves to pay that expense. This 

ii 1 see, and no law to save them. 

'ti7pn^ this law will not be hushed up any 

Frank B. Sanborn. >, ^^^ ^^^i- 

f^rom a photograph by H. G. Smith, Bostou, x , \ni\ 

'erson's 



r r, 



nosing 
gave a 



u 



he ^ 
s for 
The trait to w^ 
..te in the little i. 
Hi narrow limits, is the I 
for Emerson, the trait 
* xh kept him out o** 
left so little ground 
is the trait that n 
in whose hai 
>ciety and gover 



f( 



fIDan, tbe IReformer/' 1 1 1 



'' It was not caution," his old friend says, '' nor cold- 
ness nor selfish regard, but like the watchful care of 
a guardian spirit, such as the Demon of Socrates, so 
much disputed." His followers, like those of Socra- 
tes, might learn from him to ''become good men and 
true, capable of doing their duty by house and house- 
hold, by relations and friends, by city and fellow- 
citizens." If the conjunction of his name with that 
of the mighty Athenian should seem presumptuous, 
one has only to remember that Socrates also was 
once ''a young man in a library," a young artist, 
convinced of his commission to promote the intel- 
lectual and moral improvement of mankind. 





CHAPTER VII. 



THE DIAL. 



WITH this attitude toward unassimilated 
measures of reform, it is not strange that 
Emerson regarded the project of a Trans- 
cendental magazine with some distrust beneath his 
sincere sympathy with the aims of its founders. No 
one, in fact, was so strongly impressed by its pos- 
sibilities as to wish to assume personal responsibility 
for it, and it was at least a year after it was first sug- 
gested as a practicable scheme before the first number 
was published. Its establishment grew out of numer- 
ous discussions among the members of the Transcen- 
dental Club who desired an organ through which 
they could speak their message to the outer world. 
This club, which was called at first the ''Sympo- 
sium," was merely an informal gathering of a few 
very earnest people who met together to talk about 
the subjects in which they all were interested. These 
people, among them Theodore Parker, Margaret Ful- 
ler, Emerson, Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, and 
Elizabeth Peabody, were, according to the prospectus 



112 



ZbcMal 113 

of The Dial, possessed in common of *'the love of 
intellectural freedom and the hope of social pro- 
gress," and were '' united by sympathy of spirit, not 
by agreement in speculation." Emerson repudiated 
the idea held by many outsiders that some move- 
ment in literature, philosophy, or religion was on 
foot or even in the air. " There was no concert," he 
said, ''only here and there two or three men or 
women who read and wrote, each alone, with un- 
usual vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having 
fallen upon Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, 
then on Carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy. Other- 
wise, their education and reading were not marked, 
but had the American superficialness, and their 
studies were solitary." The order of the meetings 
as described in one of Alcott's Conversations was of 
an extreme simplicity. There was no chairman, but 
the senior member took precedence to the extent of 
inviting the other members to make remarks, and 
Mr. Alcott artlessly adds: " 1 believe there was seldom 
an inclination on the part of any to be silent." There 
appears, however, to have been singularly little self- 
confidence on the part of all concerned in The Dial, 
Margaret Fuller writes shortly before its publication, 
'*We cannot show high culture and I doubt about 
vigorous thought," and she expected, in accepting 
the post of editor, to write but little, to hazard only 
''a few critical remarks, or an unpretending chalk- 
sketch now and then." The spirit in which the 
attempt was made is defined by Emerson in the 

8 



114 IRalpb TKIlalbo lEmerson^ 

introductory article of the first number, with all 
his habitual regard for exact statement, though with 
less than his habitual distinction of style: 

'*The Editors to the Reader. 

*'We invite the attention of our countrymen to 
a new design. Probably not quite unexpected or 
unannounced will our journal appear, though small 
pains have been taken to secure its welcome. Those 
who have immediately acted in editing the present 
number can not accuse themselves of any unbecom- 
ing forwardness in their undertaking, but rather of a 
backwardness, when they remember how often in 
many private circles the work was projected, how 
eagerly desired, and only postponed because no indi- 
vidual volunteered to combine and concentrate the 
free-will offerings of many co-operators. With some 
reluctance the present conductors of this work have 
yielded themselves to the wishes of their friends, 
finding something sacred and not to be withstood in 
the importunity which urged the production of a new 
journal in a new spirit. 

''As they have not proposed themselves to the 
work, neither can they lay any the least claim to an 
option or determination of the spirit in which it is 
conceived, or to what is peculiar in the design. In 
that respect, they have obeyed, though with great 
joy, the strong current of thought and feeling, which, 
for a few years past, has led many sincere persons in 
New England to make new demands on literature and 
to reprobate that rigour of our conventions of religion 



ZbcWinl 115 

and education which is turning us to stone, which 
renounces hope, which looks only backward, which 
asks only such a future as the past, which suspects 
improvement and holds nothing so much in horror 
as new views and the dreams of youth. 

'' With these terrors the conductors of the present 
journal have nothing to do, — not even so much as a 
word of reproach to waste. They know that there 
is a portion of the youth and of the adult population 
of this country who have not shared them; who 
have, in secret or in public, paid their vows to truth 
and freedom; who love reality too well to care for 
names; and who live by a faith too earnest and too 
profound to suffer them to doubt the eternity of its 
object, or to shake themselves free from its authority. 
Under the fictions and customs which occupied 
others, these have explored the Necessary, the Plain, 
the True, the Human, and so gain a vantage-ground 
which commands the history of the past and present. 

'' No one can converse much with different classes 
of society in New England without remarking the 
progress of a revolution. Those who share in it 
have no external organisation, no badge, no creed, 
no name. They do not vote, or print or even meet 
together. They do not know each others' faces or 
names. They are united only in a common love of 
truth and love of its work. They are of all condi- 
tions and constitutions. Of these acolytes, if some 
are happily born and well-bred, many are, no doubt, 
ill dressed, ill placed, ill made, with as many scars of 



ii6 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon. 

hereditary vice as other men. Without pomp, with- 
out trumpet, in lonely and obscure places, in solitude, 
in servitude, in compunctions and privations, trudg- 
ing beside the team in the dusty road, or drudging a 
hireling in other men's cornfields, schoolmasters v/ho 
teach a few^ children rudiments for a pittance, minis- 
ters of small parishes of the obscurer sects, lone 
women in dependent condition, matrons and young 
maidens, rich and poor, beautiful and hard-favoured, 
without concert or proclamation of any kind, they 
have silently given in their several adherence to a 
new hope, and in all companies do signify a greater 
trust in the nature and resources of man than the 
laws or the popular opinions will well allow. 

'' This spirit of the time is felt by every individual 
with some difference — to each one casting its light 
upon the objects nearest to his temper and habits of 
thought: to one coming in the form of special reforms 
in the state; to another in modifications of the vari- 
ous callings of men, and the customs of business; to 
a third, opening a new scope for literature and art; 
to a fourth, in philosophical insight; to a fifth, in the 
vast solitudes of prayer. It is in every form a protest 
against usage, and a search for principles. In all its 
movements it is peaceable, and in the very lowest 
marked with a triumphant success. Of course it 
rouses the opposition of all which it judges and con- 
demns; but it is too confident in its tone to compre- 
hend an objection, and so builds no outworks for 
possible defence against contingent enemies. It has 



Zl)C 2)iaL 1 1 7 

the step of Fate, and goes on existing like an oak or 
a river, — because it must. 

'' In literature this influence appears not yet in 
new books so much as in the higher tone of criti- 
cism. The antidote to all narrowness is the com- 
parison of the record with nature, which at once 
shames the record, and stimulates to new attempts. 
Whilst we look at this, we wonder how any book 
has been thought worthy to be preserved. There 
is somewhat in all life untranslatable into language. 
He who keeps his eye on that will write better 
than others, and think less of his writing and of 
all writing. Every thought has a certain imprison- 
ing, as well as uplifting quality, and, in proportion to 
its energy on the will, refuses to become an object 
of intellectual contemplation. Thus, what is great 
usually slips through our fingers; and it seems won- 
derful how a lifelike word ever comes to be written. 
If our ournal shares the impulses of the time, it can 
not now prescribe its own course. It can not fore- 
tell in orderly propositions what it shall attempt. All 
criticism should be poetic, unpredictable; supersed- 
ing, as every new thought does, all foregone thoughts, 
and making a new light on the whole world. Its 
brow is not wrinkled with circumspection, but serene, 
cheerful, adoring. It has all things to say, and no 
less than all the world for its final audience. 

''Our plan embraces much more than criticism; 
were it not so, our criticism would be nought. Every- 
thing noble is directed on life, and this is. We do 



ii8 IRalpb Malt)0 lemereon* 

not wish to say pretty or curious things, or to reiterate 
a few propositions in varied forms, but, if we can, to 
give expression to that spirit which lifts men to a 
higher platform, restores to them the religious senti- 
ment, brings them worthy aims and pure pleasures, 
purges the inward eye, makes life less desultory, and, 
through raising man to the level of nature, takes 
away its melancholy from the landscape, and recon- 
ciles the practical with the speculative powers. 

''But perhaps we are telling our little story too 
gravely. There are always great arguments at hand 
for a true action, even for the writing of a few pages. 
There is nothing but seems near it, and prompts it, — 
the sphere in the ecliptic, the sap in the apple-tree, 
every fact, every appearance, seem to persuade to it. 

"Our means correspond with the ends we have 
indicated. As we wish, not to multiply books, but 
to report life, our resources are not so much the pens 
of practised writers, as the discourse of the living, 
and the portfolios which friendship has opened to us. 
From the beautiful recesses of private thought; from 
the experience and hope of spirits which are with- 
drawing from all old forms, and seeking in all that is 
new somewhat to meet their inappeasable longings; 
from the secret confession of genius afraid to trust 
itself to aught but sympathy; from the conversation 
of fervid and mystical pietists; from tear-stained dia- 
ries of sorrow and passion; from the manuscripts of 
young poets; and from the records of youthful taste 
commenting on old works of art, — we hope to draw 



ZbcMal 119 

thoughts and feelings which being alive can impart 
life. 

'' And so with diligent hands and good intent we 
set down our Dial on the earth. We wish it may 
resemble that instrument in its celebrated happiness, 
that of measuring no hours but those of sunshine. 
Let it be one cheerful, rational voice amidst the 
din of mourners and polemics. Or to abide by our 
chosen image, let it be such a dial, not as the dead 
face of a clock, — hardly, even, such as the gnomon 
in a garden, — but rather such a Dial as is the Garden 
itself in whose leaves and flowers and fruits the sud- 
denly awakened sleeper is instantly apprised, not 
what part of dead time, but what state of life and 
growth, is now arrived and arriving." 

In the group of chief contributors, a group that 
at this time formed an important part of Emerson's 
milieu, Alcott holds, perhaps, the most prominent 
' place and presents, certainly, the most pictorial and 
peculiar figure. At the meetings of the Club he was 
among the members least inclined to silence. He 
had many thoughts and opinions in common with 
Emerson, but held them nebulously, and, unless he 
could have speech for his medium, he was practically 
helpless to convey them. Emerson pressed him to 
let go his fantastic yet curiously intelligent and far- 
sighted schemes for the education of the human race, 
and write, but when he did write not even so loyal 
a supporter as Emerson could find many of what he 
called the ''anchylosed" pages good reading. Yet 



I20 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon* 

with his friends Alcott seems to have had an almost 
irresistible charm. Mr. Woodbury's fine description 
of him at the high tide of his personal influence gives 
a certain reality to his place in Emerson's mind; so 
difficult to appreciate at the distance of more than 
half a century: 

''Who that met him in the conversa:{ioni which 
he made so popular can forget the experience; the 
master's ' solar face ' framed in that wealth of hair in 
which the white breath of his soul had been caught 
and kept; his pleasant fervours; his irresistible hyper- 
boles; his colours, dilatations, magniloquence, glori- 
ous soarings to the great might-have-been; sublime 
and ideal chimeras ; the winning wilfulness with 
which he presented a sometimes erroneous philoso- 
phy; his pictures, delicate rather than distinct, and 
somewhat bleached as if conceived amid etiolated 
conditions; his fugitive answerings, orphic, subtle, 
like quicksilver, and even when merely amoebasan, 
the participants having dropped out, and the ground 
beneath sounding hollow to every ear but his, so 
surpassingly complete and master-like, always satis- 
fying the questioner, who enjoyed if he could not 
acquiesce." 

Theodore Parker, to whose sturdy English and 
aggressive spirituality The Dial owed a large part of 
its meagre popularity, stood at the other end of the 
line from Alcott. A great student, acquiring with 
avidity, but failing somewhat in original discern- 
ment; a notable orator in the conventional sense of 



ZbcWial 121 

the word, finding it easy to weep and to make 
others weep; an uncompromising moralist without 
the poetic apprehension of the source and signifi- 
cance of morals; his thundering virtue and his ex- 
uberant sentiment repelled Emerson as Alcott's vast 
idealism attracted him. Nevertheless, although he 
was never able to regard Parker with that rare and 
deep affection accorded to the few friends he re- 
ceived as intimates, Emerson analysed his character 
with justice and insight. 

'' His commanding merit as a reformer," he 
wrote of him after his death, "is this, that he in- 
sisted beyond all men in pulpits that the essence 
of Christianity is practical morals. It is there for 
use or it is nothing; and if you combine it with 
sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to 
gloss over municipal corruptions, or private intem- 
perance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or 
unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the rob- 
bery of frontier nations, or leaving your principles at 
home to follow on the high seas or in Europe a 
supple complaisance to tyrants, — it is a hypocrisy, 
and the truth is not in you, and no love of religious 
music or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John 
Wesley, or of Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the 
Satan which you are." No doubt the absence of 
aesthetic preoccupations and what Dr. Chadwick has 
called the ''flat-footed, downright fashion of his 
mind " formed the most obvious barrier between 
Parker's intelligence and Emerson's, but beyond 



122 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 

these the ''one fault " to which Emerson referred 
in the same memorial speech, the lack of measure, 
made a radical division. " He overestimated his 
friends — I may well say it — and sometimes vexed 
them with the importunity of his good opinion 
whilst they knew better the ebb which follows un- 
founded praise." It is significant that The Dial's 
most acceptable contributor from the popular point 
of view should have been one so little acceptable to 
Emerson, with precisely the reverse condition in the 
case of Alcott, a friend whom Emerson certainly did 
not underestimate, and who, according to Dr. Hig- 
ginson, was by all odds the least popular of the 
writers for the new magazine. Between the two 
lay a body of talent decidedly above the average. 
George Ripley, who undertook the business man- 
agement and was active in the organisation of the 
scheme, was Parker's close friend and sympathetic 
with his aims and ideas. He was a professional 
writer in more than one sense, the management of 
words as tools of expression coming easily to him. 
His criticisms are marked by the instinctive mental 
revision to which a writer may be born, but the 
secret of which can never be wholly imparted. He 
was characterised by Carlyle as ''the Socinian min- 
ister, who left his pulpit in order to reform the world 
by cultivating onions," and it is quite possible that 
he will be longer known as the organiser of Brook 
Farm than as a writer. 

His principal associate on The Dial was Margaret 



.') 1 w^ I I I 1 I >^( 



rcierred 

isure, 

cl his 

/exed 

inion 

)ws un- 

. that The Dials 

ntributor from the popular point 

ave been one so little acceptable to 

precisely the reverse condition in the 

\lcott, a friend whom Emerson certainly did 

not underestimate, and who, according to Dr. Hig- 

i, was by all odds the least popular of the 

^ for the ne^ Between the two 

body of-t' Bromon /llcotU...r^ the average. 

^ From a photograph. 

pir.L. *^ ' ness man- 

ui aiiu ••->" of the 

•npathetic 
fessional 
ment of 
to him 
rked by the i tive mei 

ro which a writer may be born, but the 
•hirh rnn never be wholly imparted. 

■o... .J C'^rW\c^ ,he Socinian n 

u\. ,>..i :..r \r^ feform the v^'< 

iiite possible i 
organiser of ^' 

' tu Dial was M: 



ZhcWml 123 

Fuller, a remarkable member of the Transcendental 
circle, born some fifty years too early to come into 
the now ample reward of " women's work " in litera- 
ture and scholarship. The wasteful New England 
of her youth and prime poured her unusual talents 
on the bare earth as David poured out the water 
brought at the peril of life from the well of Bethle- 
hem. Her name is no longer interesting as a maker 
of literature, yet literature of a singular excellence 
she undoubtedly made. Mr. Higginson's sympa- 
thetic biography shows her temperament in the light 
of common day, and it is a temperament to reward 
study. By the side of Emerson, whom she ardently 
admired and dauntlessly criticised, she holds her 
own both in thought and feeling. Her unwillingness 
to confine her tastes and sympathies to the meagre 
best prescribed by him undoubtedly accounts in part 
for the dissipation of her energies. She had neither 
his severe capacity for ignoring what was away from 
his work, nor for deciding definitely what work was 
to be invariably and exclusively followed as the 
Path, the Way, of individual salvation. Sisterly 
sacrifices and the bearing of many burdens not her 
own persistently interfered with her intellectual pur- 
poses, and her editorship of The Dial is a conspicu- 
ous instance of her generous, but at times, certainly, 
excessive zeal. She could not bring absolute faith 
to the favourite Transcendental doctrine that being 
was better than doing. The contrast between the 
life of Socrates, the thinker, and that of Jesus who 



124 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon* 

preached in the field, plucking ears of corn on the 
Sabbath day, led her to question if it were not 
deeper and truer to live in action than in thought. 
Not less impatient than Emerson of futile and child- 
ish methods in reform her curiosity extended as his 
did not, to interrogation of the facts of ignorance 
and vice and misery. Her mysticism was worn as a 
garment merely, and the firm body of her intellect 
moved most freely when she threw off its entangling 
folds. If she was eager and theoretic she was also 
dispassionate and discriminating, and she insisted 
upon a decent background of scholarship for her 
literary performance. The picture of her solitary 
study in the Harvard College Library, the only 
woman who had up to that time ventured within 
its precincts for references necessary to the satisfac- 
tory accomplishment of a literary task, suggests 
the enterprise of spirit and her independence of 
judgment. 

Her literary work, like that of George Eliot, began 
with translations from the German, and when she 
was twenty-five she thought of trying whether she 
had ''the hand to paint as well as the eye to see." 
If ''the wild gnomes " would but keep from her with 
their shackles of care for bread she thought she 
might write into fictitious shape what she knew of 
human nature, inspired thereto by the novels of 
George Sand. She never got so far, but the imagin- 
ation that busies itself with these types of partly 
developed New England genius, pressed into strange 



i 



ZhcWxal 125 

aspects by the restrictions on one side and the op- 
portunities on the other of their environment, finds a 
certain reward in conjecturing the farthest flight her 
capabilities under more favouring conditions might 
have made. Not less typically womanly than Marian 
Evans, she was at once less simple and less pedan- 
tic, and while it is impossible to think of a Middle- 
march as under any circumstances issuing from her 
pen, it must also be admitted that she seldom wrote 
anything so dull or so didactic as Theophrastus Such. 
The work she put into The Dial was most of it 
hastily prepared and represents only the crude idea 
unmellowed by revision. Read as a whole it is sur- 
prisingly sound and astute, however, and true to a 
high critical standard. 

If Alcott may be said vaguely to stand for phi- 
losophy, Parker for practical morals, and Margaret 
Fuller for criticism, Henry Thoreau must represent 
science on its most engaging side. He brought to 
the magazine a continuous record of facts, delicately 
observed and poetically described. He was a loving 
reader of the best poetry of the past and was deeply 
saturated with the spirit of the Elizabethan period, 
but when he came to his own work he found it to 
lie not in libraries but in the woods. Like nearly all 
of his collaborators, he has given expression in his 
writings to sentiments and opinions identical with 
those held by Emerson. For example, in 1836, a 
year before the lecture on The American Scholar 
was delivered, we find him declaring that although 



126 IRalpb Malbo Emereon* 

Americans had rejected the tea of Great Britain that 
country still supplied them with food for the mind, 
and that few American authors were content to write 
of the homely robin redbreast and the straggling 
rail-fences of their native land. His superficial re- 
semblance to Emerson deepened the impression of 
his indebtedness to the influence of that dominating 
mind, but his passionate interrogation of the details 
of external nature led him into paths upon which 
Emerson declined to wander. He was that rare 
combination of naturalist and poet, an ''outdoor 
man," with an inward glance at the soul. His was 
a classical temper united to the eye of an Indian. 
His skill of hand gave him superiority to ''things" 
without the contempt for them so often expressed 
by the abstract thinker, so pungently expressed by 
Emerson himself in his memorable phrase: "Things 
are in the saddle and ride mankind." 

Therefore, although it is said that Thoreau's mode 
of speaking and his intonation caught the trick of 
Emerson's so nearly that the two could hardly be 
separated in conversation, his mind did not catch 
the peculiar flavour of Emerson's but developed one 
unique and delectable, as different from that of others 
as wild fruit is from the cultivated. 

With this cluster of talented young writers, all in 
their fourth decade except Thoreau who was only 
three and twenty, each different from the rest in all 
but earnestness and general direction of purpose, 
there was every reason to predict for The Dial a 



.LI ^»^^i 



,t Britain thai 

the mind, 

It to write 

igling 

il re- 

.IppnPi . . '" of 

juess to *'' • that dominating 

but his i^ i.iierrogation of the details 

ernal nature led him into paths upon which 
Fmer<;on declined to wander. He was that rare 
.lion of naturalist and poet, an outdoor 
man • with an inward^ glance at the soul. His was 
a clissical temper united to the eye of an Indian. 
His skill of ^^■"MenPV-DvJ'fiorm'iiioTiiy to things 

"thftllt '' From a itid engraving. ' eXpreSSeO 

. essed by 

t>y the ab^ ,.,^i„g, 

Emerson him 

» the j„ 

tusmode 

me trick of 
rly that the two could hardly be 
onversation, 1 nd did not catcl. 

llavour of ' hut developed 

ti a delectabk , lerent from that of ot 

a lit is fror- *''" cultivated. 

this cluster oi talented young writers, 
,, decade except Thoreau who was 

venty, each different from the rest . 
;s and general direction of pur 
^;ry reason to predict for Th, 



V 



Zbc'Binl 127 

brighter future than those most interested in it fore- 
saw, and while their doubtful prognostications were 
sanctioned by the outcome, it is impossible to ac- 
count for the failure of The Dial to command a pub- 
lic on the ground of uninteresting subject matter or 
a low literary standard. 

When in 1882 it was proposed to issue a reprint 
of the magazine, George William Curtis wrote of it 
in the following eulogistic but discriminating strain : 

''There had been nothing like it in this country, 
and if Schiller's Horen may have aimed as high, there 
were not the same favouring circumstances, so that 
The Dial remains unique in periodical literature. Its 
purpose was the most varied expression of the best, 
the most cultivated, and the freest thought of the 
time, and was addressed to those only who were 
able to find ' entertainment ' in such literature. There 
were no baits for popularity. In the modern familiar 
phrase, each number was a symposium of the most 
accomplished minds in the country ... it is 
the memorial of an intellectual impulse which the 
national life has never lost." 

As such a memorial alone The Dial still deserves 
attention and certainly no recorder of Emerson's in- 
dividual effort can afford to ignore the picture it pre- 
sents of his intellectual surroundings. The puzzle 
for the modern reader is to analyse the quality by 
which he was lifted out of them into permanence. 

A month before its appearance The Dial could 
boast of but thirty subscribers, and upon this insecure 



128 IRalpb Malbo lemereon. 

basis it was brought into the world with a fine dis- 
regard of consequences. Its first number was re- 
ceived by those who contributed to it in much the 
same spirit they had shown in forwarding the pro- 
ject. In place of the elation commonly attending the 
birth of a printed organ of cherished ideas — such ela- 
tion as the young Preraphaslites felt in contemplating 
the Germ, for example, — much dissatisfaction was 
expressed. Margaret Fuller wrote to Emerson, '' I 
feel myself how far it is from the eaglet motion I 
wanted. I suffer in looking over it now." Alcott 
complained in an Orphic outburst : 'Mt measures not 
the meridian but the morning ray ; the nations wait 
for the gnomon that shall mark the broad noon." 
And Emerson wrote to Carlyle that it contained 
*' scarce anything considerable or even visible." 

Yet it contained among other things Charles Emer- 
son's Notes from the Journal of a Scholar, in which the 
family likeness existing among the minds of the Em- 
ersons is conspicuous, Thoreau's fine poem Sympathy, 
and Dwight's Religion of Beauty striking at the out- 
set an Emersonian note: *'The devout mind is a 
lover of nature. Where there is beauty it feels at 
home." It also contained the first instalment of the 
Orphic Sayings by Mr. Alcott, which, according to 
Mr. Frothingham, were '*an amazement to the un- 
initiated and an amusement to the profane," but 
which Emerson himself pronounced the distinguish- 
ing feature of the new journal — as beyond all dispute 
they were ! Except for the extraordinary rhetoric of 



^beDiaL 129 

these, the general impression was of a literary maga- 
zine of a more than usually serious tone but without 
idiosyncrasy. 

The second number counted among its notable 
articles Emerson's Thoughts on Modern Literature be- 
ginning with this characteristic passage : 

''There is no better illustration of the laws by 
which the world is governed than Literature. There 
is no luck in it. It proceeds by Fate. Every Script- 
ure proceeds out of a greater or less depth of thought, 
and this is the measure of its effect. The highest 
class of books are those which express the moral ele- 
ment ; the next, works of imagination ; and the next, 
works of science ; — all dealing in realities, — and what 
ought to be, what is, and what appears. These in 
proportion to the truth and beauty they involve re- 
main ; the rest perish." 

Another article in the same number, The Art of 
Life — The Scholar's Calling, is attributed by Mr. 
Cooke to F. H. Hedge, but in spirit, if not in form, 
it bears Emerson's impress to such a degree as to de- 
ceive the unwary, as the following extracts will serve 
to demonstrate: '* Of self-culture, as of all other 
things worth seeking, the price is a single devotion 
to that object, — a devotion which shall exclude all 
aims and ends that do not directly or indirectly tend 
to promote it. . . . Much that he has been ac- 
customed to consider as most desirable, he will have 
to renounce. Much that other men esteem as high- 
est and follow after as the grand reality, he will have 



I30 IRalpb XKHal&o lEmer^on* 

to forego. No emoluments must seduce him from 
the rigour of his devotion. No engagements beyond 
the merest necessities of life must interfere with his 
pursuit. A meagre economy must be his income. 
' Spare fast that oft with the gods doth diet ' must 
be his fare. The rusty coat must be his badge. Ob- 
scurity must be his distinction. . . . In self-cul- 
ture lies the ground and condition of all culture. 
Not those who seem most earnest in promoting the 
culture of Society do most effectually promote it. 
We have reformers in abundance, but few who in 
the end, will be found to have aided essentially the 
cause of human improvement ; either because they 
have failed to illustrate in themselves the benefits 
they wished to inculcate, or because there is a ten- 
dency in mankind to resist overt efforts to guide and 
control them. The silent influence of example, 
where no influence is intended is the true reformer." 
For this number Emerson furnished a long review 
oi New Poetry by William Ellery Channing, the first 
part of IVood Notes, a short poem Silence, and two or 
three notices of books of the month. Much of the 
remaining prose is so thoroughly saturated with the 
spirit which has come to be identified with him, as 
to seem to the casual reader the work of one pen and 
that pen Emerson's, not always at its best to be sure, 
but always announcing a consistent body of belief 
One more extract, in this case from a Letter to a 
Theological Student, written by Mr. Ripley, to indi- 
cate the pervasiveness of the Emerson ideal : 



ZhcWial 131 

''No man can preach well unless he coins his 
own flesh and blood, the living, palpitating fibre of 
his very heart, into the words which he utters from 
the pulpit. If he speaks what he has learned from 
others, what he finds in books, what he thinks it de- 
corous and seemly that a man should say in his 
place, he may indeed be a good mechanic in the pul- 
pit, he may help to hand down a worm-eaten stereo- 
typed system of theology, to those who have no 
more heart for it than he has himself; but a true 
prophet of God, a man baptised with the Holy Ghost 
and with fire he can never be." 

Even such fragmentary examples show how 
closely many of Emerson's associates were in sym- 
pathy with his opinions, and lead us to the one con- 
clusion, that his opinions have outlasted theirs in 
influence because the fabric into which he wove 
them was so skilfully made, because his style, in 
short was so admirably adapted to his purpose and 
so artistically composed. 

Yet even he did not escape the onslaught of the 
scoffers against the early numbers of the innocent 
Dial, and its more eccentric contributors were butts 
of unholy mirth from all directions, the Orphic Say- 
ings opening a vein of dazzling promise to the toiling 
miners of the newspaper world and furnishing them 
with ''copy" for continuous use. Mr. Higginson 
tells us that the serene philosopher showed himself 
worthy of his title by composedly collecting and 
labelling the worst parodies of his writings with the 



132 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 

precision and neatness characteristic of him and 
without apparent annoyance. 

Possibly because the editor tried to avoid mishaps 
by bringing the magazine into harmony with more 
conventional tastes, the third number, although Em- 
erson contributed three poems and three prose ar- 
ticles and Lowell a sonnet, showed a decided falling 
off in the quality of its contents. It was made for- 
ever memorable, however, by the appearance on its 
pages of Emerson's poem The Sphinx, in which his 
wise spiritual questionings leap into a form so spon- 
taneous and vital, so individual and robust, so in- 
stinct with the force and charm of antique aspects 
of art, as to make us keenly realise the absence of 
aesthetic standards and interests in a public that did 
not instantly rise to the recognition of a new poet 
different in kind from any who had gone before. 
There was nothing feverish in the admirations of the 
Transcendentalists. The friends of Morris and Ros- 
setti might be exulting at Oxford with strange capers 
over the discovery that '' Topsy " was a ''big poet " 
but The Sphinx found no reader to dance with ab- 
original glee at the voice of the living Spirit. Yet 
the poem flashed and darted over the dull pages 
of The Dial's third number, as sportive in its genius 
as some creature of the woods abandoning itself to 
the joy of motion in unvisited solitudes. The images 
chosen present a picture purely the fruit of a power- 
ful imagination. None of Thoreau's native birds and 
rustic fences enter into its composition. It carries 



Zhc Wxal 133 

the reader into the vast desert where the drowsy 
Sphinx broods over her problem with creation gam- 
bolling about her. Why indeed should a poet 
trouble and divert his mind with Brook Farms and 
other systems of education, when his inner vision 
dwells on these enchanting phantoms of the mind: 

Erect as a sunbeam 
Upspringeth the palm 
The elephant browses 
Undaunted and calm; 
In beautiful motion 
The thrush plies his wings, 
Kind leaves of his covert! 
Your silence he sings. 

The waves unashamed, 
In difference sweet. 
Play glad with the breezes, 
Old playfellows meet. 

The deep sense of mystery and wonder by which 
the poem is pervaded is reminiscent of no other 
poet. The grotesque shapes and curious conceits 
have in them no suggestion of artifice; they are the 
natural outcome of an imagination that sees symbolic 
pictures without the aid of external objects. One 
of the Orphic Sayings in the same number of The 
Dial with The Sphinx declares that '' to apprehend a 
miracle, a man must first have wrought it; he knows 
only what he has lived and interprets facts in the 
light of his experience." In some prior existence, 
then, the quiet poet of Concord must have lived no- 
madic under the wide Egyptian heavens, working 



134 IRalpb Malbo jemereom 

the vastness and splendour of nature into his art with 
such angular forms as the Egyptian decorator used 
in painting his mummy cases, and regarding the ele- 
ments as comrades of the desert places. The penul- 
timate stanza of The Sphinx as it was printed in The 
Dial emphasises the extraordinary mood of exuberant 
fancy in which the poem was conceived, the third 
and fourth lines reading: 

She hopped into the baby's eyes, 
She hopped into the moon. 

The revised version has gained inexpressibly in 
beauty, but has lost the artlessness that suggests the 
atmosphere of primeval myth in which the whole 
thought is enveloped. The monster, hopping from 
her lethargic dream to the child's eyes and to the 
lovely lady of the heavens, produces an effect of un- 
earthly strangeness that haunts the mind like the 
miraculous detail of some ancient fairy story ad- 
justed through slow ages to the apprehension of 
countless generations of credulous minds. What 
strikes one now in reading it is not that its philosophy 
is Eastern nor its expression of faith inspiring, or its 
mysticism unintelligible, but that its beauty is divine 
and indescribable, outside of rules and vivid with 
genius. After this shining achievement of the pure 
Transcendentalism which Emerson declared could 
nowhere exist, the fourth number of The Dial opened 
with an article on The Unitarian Movement in New 
England, of a rather dreary character. The pleas- 
ant humdrum sermonising of Dwight's Ideals of 



Every-Day Life and a fantastic attempt on the part 
of Miss Fuller to depict her own soul as a person 
bearing the name of Leila offer but a moderate 
feast of reason, and not until Theodore Parker's 
Honest Thoughts on Labour, and Emerson's Man, 
the Reformer, published at the request of the Me- 
chanic's Apprentice's Library Association before 
which it had been read, were reached did the reader 
find anything to cheer him. These two papers 
stamped the fourth number with distinction, but it 
was obviously declining in weight and interest and 
bade fair to justify Carlyle's verdict that it was "too 
spirit-like, aeriform, auroraborealislike." The editor's 
difficulties were increasing instead of diminishing 
with time, and there was no prospect of financial 
success sufficient even to insure the modest salary 
she had hoped to draw from the profits. She was 
not yet ready, however, to confess the attempt a 
failure, and her second volume opens bravely with 
her own excellent paper on Goethe, and to the first 
number she also contributes another prose article 
and five book reviews, one of them a notice of Low- 
ell's A Year's Life, which she finds '' superficial, full 
of obvious cadences and obvious thoughts, but 
sweet, fluent, in a large style, and breathing the life 
of religious love." J. A. Saxton's Prophecy — Tran- 
scendentalism — Progress, occupying nearly forty 
pages, was perhaps a godsend to an editor anxious 
to fill space, but it hardly fulfilled the conditions an- 
nounced to would-be contributors, that all articles 



136 IRalpb 'Wnalbo Emerson^ 

accepted must combine individuality of character 
with vigour and accuracy of style. How difficult to 
maintain this standard proved is shown by the fact 
that in the next number Miss Fuller herself was 
obliged to contribute eighty-six of its one hundred 
and thirty-five pages. Of the remaining forty-nine 
Emerson's work filled eighteen, and twelve were 
given up to Dr. Henry More's poem, Cupid's Conflict, 
sent by Mr. Alcott in place of the original contribu- 
tion requested of him. It was obvious that The Dial 
could not long be continued under such conditions. 
It is amazing that two more numbers were produced 
before Miss Fuller sent to Emerson what he must 
long have been prepared to receive, the news that she 
was forced to give up the editorship. She wrote with 
dignity of her unrewarded labours and concluded: 

'' I think perhaps Mr. Parker would like to carry 
it on even under these circumstances. For him or for 
you it would be much easier than for me, for you 
have quiet homes and better health. Of course if 
you do carry it on, I should like to do anything I 
can to aid you." 

Emerson finally, with much reluctance, consented 
to nurse The Dial back to life. He undertook to as- 
sume the editorship rather than have it ''go into the 
hands that know not Joseph," and with his usual wis- 
dom he declined to consider a partnership with Mr. 
Parker or Mr. Ripley, although he wrote to Carlyle, 
*Terhaps it is a great folly in me who have little adroit- 
ness in turning off work to assume this sure vexation. " 



Zbc Wial 137 

To the last one of the numbers issued under 
Margaret Fuller's editorship Mr. Alcott contributed 
an article of his own which he called Days from a 
Diary. There had been some delay about publish- 
ing it, and when it appeared it was prefaced by a 
note from Alcott in which he makes this supremely 
candid admission : 

'' The Dial prefers a style of thought and diction 
not mine, nor can I add to its popularity with its chos- 
en readers. A fit organ for such as myself is not yet, 
but is to be. The times require a free speech, a wise 
humane, and brave sincerity, unlike all examples in 
literature, of which The Dial is but the precursor. A 
few years more will give us all we desire — the public 
all they ask." 

It would not have been strange had he looked 
with some confidence toward Emerson's editorship 
for this result although for one cause or another it 
happened that he himself had but one more contri- 
bution on the pages of The Dial. As a matter of fact 
the public asked for something quite different from 
what either he or Emerson desired, and the list of 
subscribers to The Dial never reached a total of three 
hundred names. Hereafter, however, the magazine 
maintained a standard little lower than the best in 
the line it followed. It was intimately related to the 
highest culture of the time in America, and the eight 
numbers of its last two years furnish a unique illus- 
tration of the kind of literature in which the jewel of 
Emerson's genius was set. 



CHAPTER VIII. 
THE DIAL {Continued). 

EMERSON'S first number of The Dial shows 
that he was bending to his task with the 
same energetic efficiency displayed by him 
in conducting Carlyle's affairs. It opens with his 
introductory lecture on The Times, read at the 
Masonic Temple in Boston on December 2, 1841, 
and this was followed by Thoreau's Natural History 
of Massachusetts, with the following explanatory 
note: 

'' We were thinking how we might best celebrate 
the good deed which the State of Massachusetts 
has done in procuring the Scientific Survey of the 
Commonwealth, whose result is recorded in these 
volumes, when we found a near neighbour and 
friend of ours, dear also to the Muses, a native and 
an inhabitant of Concord, who readily undertook to 
give us such comments as he had made on these 
books, and better still, notes of his own conversation 
with nature in the woods and waters of this town. 

With all thankfulness we begged our friend to lay 

138 



ZhcWial 139 

down the oar and fishing-line, which none can handle 
better, and assume the pen, that Isaak Walton and 
White of Selborne might not want a successor, nor 
the fair meadows, to which we also have owed a 
home and the happiness of many years, their poet. 

Editor of The Dial." 

In this paper, Thoreau steps easily into his place 
as a writer on nature, the somewhat academic task 
of reviewing the records of the Scientific Survey 
interfering but little with his characteristic charm of 
style in natural description. What Emerson calls his 
*' conversation with nature " lost none of its spright- 
liness by its connection with the facts and figures 
of the conscientious surveyor, and the delightful 
poetry of certain passages, that on spearing fish, for 
example, he never surpassed. It was the begin- 
ning, in America, of the kind of nature-writing which 
in late years has inundated the magazines, and in 
Thoreau's case it was the result of a creative imagina- 
tion working upon the material that lay about him, 
which has not by any means been true of all his 
followers. His articles gave The Dial a freshness and 
an outdoor sweetness which without him it would 
have lacked, for not even Emerson would have been 
able to supply that peculiar element tending to such 
healthful repose of mind and simplicity of mood. 

A very different but an almost equally interesting 
feature of the magazine under Emerson's management 
was the series of selections from the oldest ethical and 
religious writings of men, introduced by a paragraph, 



I40 IRalpb Malbo lemerson. 

the prophetic sound of which has already to a de- 
gree been justified by the course of study adopted 
by the modern theologian of the advanced school. 

''Each nation has its bible, more or less pure; 
none has yet been willing or able in a wise and devout 
spirit to collate its own with those of other nations, 
and, sinking the civil-historical and the ritual por- 
tions, to bring together the grand expressions of the 
moral sentiment in different ages and races, the rules 
for the guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of 
abandonment to the Invisible and Eternal, — a work 
inevitable sooner or later, and which we hope is to 
be done by religion and not by literature." 

The first extracts were taken from the Amicable 
Instructions of Veeshnoo Sarma, and the series was 
kept up to the end of the magazine, the selections 
being made by different persons from the Laws of 
Menu, the Sayings of Confucius, the Preachings of 
Buddha, the Desatir, the Chinese Four Books, and 
the Chaldean Oracles. 

Of the forty-three articles and poems comprising 
Emerson's first number, he himself contributed fif- 
teen, Margaret Fuller came loyally to his aid with 
a twenty-six-page review of the winter's entertain- 
ments, written with such acuteness and breadth of 
view as to make it still readable and suggestive after 
an interval of sixty years. It is amusing to find her 
arguing with all the force of her metropolitan taste 
against the Boston suspicion of theatrical perform- 
ances, and contending that the lecture makes but a 



'■*-^}i}tm r-^ 





-, , U Li I 

tions, 

uiu liic uLual por- 

ic grand expressions of the 

iiUerent ages and races, the rules 

of life, the bursts of piety and of 

It to the Invisible and Eternal, — a work 

inevitable sooner or later, and which we hope is to 

be done by religion and not bv literature.* 

^ ........ ^Yie selections 

I irom the Laws of 

rgs of 

. and 



e art! 


comprisi • 


iber. 


. iributed i..- 




ilv in his aid with 




...er's entertain- 




"nd breadth of 


-uii r( 


estive after 




ising to find h( r 




etropolitan ta^' • 




rical pei 




lure makes 



cold and unpersuasive substitute for the acted drama. 
Her influence was ardently thrown on the side of 
what is still the "new movement" in the theatre- 
going world, and she urged those interested in the 
elevation of public taste to ''form themselves into 
committees of direction for the theatre " instead of 
trying to put it down without anything to take its 
place more fully than Emerson's beloved Lyceum. 
The vivacious tone of this article, and the bright 
incisive description of Fourierism in Emerson's paper 
on that subject, together with his vivid paper on the 
Convention of the Friends of Universal Reform, gave 
the freshness to the magazine which the earlier 
numbers had lacked, and infused a gay sympathy 
with good purposes into its somewhat self-con- 
sciously virtuous point of view. To read and re- 
member that neither editor nor contributors received 
a penny's worth of material reward for their efforts 
is to wonder at the sturdy quality of the edifice built 
on a foundation of pure disinterested faith in human 
nature. Yet the intimate human appeal which has 
been said to constitute the demand of the magazine 
audience was conspicuously absent. And this, no 
doubt, was the secret of the slow response to The 
Dial's merits on the part of even a Massachusetts pub- 
lic, in whom, as Margaret Fuller frankly complained, 
the intellectual qualities were developed out of all pro- 
portion to the emotional qualities. How pleasantly a 
plain picture of common human interests varies the 
most admirable idealism is seen in Emerson's sketch 



142 IRalpb Malbo lEmereom 

of the old-fashioned New England farmer with his 
shrewd criticism of the Agricultural Survey's Report 
and his immovable skepticism concerning the benefits 
conferred by legislature upon the agriculture of Mass- 
achusetts. More of such character drawing easily 
might have turned the fortunes of The Dial. In place 
of it, papers on literary and social subjects, together 
with poetry, filled the second number. Emerson 
had early expressed his conviction that the poetry 
in The Dial was its most valuable feature, and the 
very large proportion of poetry to prose in the later 
years of the magazine illustrates his readiness to carry 
his theory into practice. The opening article of the 
second number is an interesting account of Romaic 
and Rhine ballads by Margaret Fuller, with copious 
quotations, and in the same number appear eight 
poems by Thoreau, two by W. E. Channing, and 
Emerson's Saadi, the last mentioned provoking 
the reader to ask what it is doing in that galere, 
with its debonair defiance of the sanction of the 
moral world, and its outspoken assumption that the 
poet should keep away from social and national 
problems: 

Whispered the Muse in Saadi's cot: 
*' O gentle Saadi, listen not, 
Tempted by thy praise of wit, 
Or by thirst and appetite 
For the talents not thine own, 
To sons of contradiction. 
Never, son of eastern morning 
Follow falsehood, follow scorning, 



Jlhc Dial. 143 

Denounce who will, who will deny, 
And pile the hills to scale the sky; 
Let theist, atheist, pantheist, 
Define and wrangle how they list, 
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer, — 
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer. 
Unknowing war, unknowing crime, 
Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme; 
Heed not what the brawlers say, 
Heed thou only Saadi's lay. 

** Let the great world bustle on, 

With war and trade, with camp and town; 

A thousand men shall dig and eat; 

At forge and furnace thousands sweat; 

And thousands sail the purple sea. 

And give or take the stroke of war, 

And crowd the market and bazaar; 

Oft shall war end, and peace return, 

And cities rise where cities burn, 

Ere one man my hill shall climb, 

Who can turn the golden rhyme. 

Let them manage how they may, 

Heed thou only Saadi's lay." 

The poet, then, should let questions of slavery 
and anti-slavery, temperance and intemperance, 
women's rights and women's wrongs. Socialism and 
despotism pass by him, while he minds his rhyme. 
How grateful Emerson would have been for the 
mental and moral liberty to follow such a course 
literally we know from the longing allusions to it, 
the continual counsel toward it, and the deep appre- 
ciation of it, scattered through his writings from the 
beginning to the end of his life. He detested the 
activity of practical reforms as heartily as William 



144 IRalpb Mal&o jemereon* 

Morris detested the active Socialism into which his 
conscience goaded him, and even the mild and pass- 
ive Dial bustled on too busily for the tranquillity of 
mind in which he could work at ease. His judg- 
ment suggested for the magazine a different tone from 
that most suited to his own voice in personal utter- 
ance. He thought it ought to contain '' the best advice 
on the topics of Government, Temperance, Aboli- 
tion, Trade, and Domestic Life," and he debated 
whether it should not be ''a degree nearer to the 
hodiernal facts " than his own writings were. Thus 
convinced he published articles on the Hollis Street 
Council, on English Reformers and American Re- 
formers, on theologians and systems of theology, 
and only when he was clothed in the garment of his 
verse did he cry to the high heavens against the 
unimportance of all but poetry. In his prose writ- 
ings, however, he adopted uniformly the poetic view, 
he looked for relations, and balance, and unity under 
variety, for harmony and rhythm and all the ele- 
ments of beautiful design, and if he failed to find 
them, no amount of excellent intention could make a 
thing thoroughly right in his eyes. Note, for exam- 
ple, what he demands in his description of the ideal 
man in the paper on The Conservative. Here if any- 
where one might look for partial and practical obser- 
vation. But looking at the conservative, Emerson 
saw the whole intention of nature so fragmentarily 
carried out in the best of us, and, as always, he held 
this before us for our sane consideration, laying spe- 



Margaret Fuller. 

From a photograph by Lawrence. 





k^ 



Z\)c 2)iaL 145 

cial emphasis on the result of beauty obtained from 
the perfect adjustment of complementary parts: 

''And so, whilst we do not go beyond general 
statements, it may safely be affirmed of these two 
metaphysical antagonists (Conservatism and Reform) 
that each is a good half, but an imperfect whole. 
Each exposes the abuse of the other, but in a true 
society, in a true man both must combine. Nature 
does not give the crown of its approbation, namely 
Beauty, to any action or emblem or actor, but to one 
which combines both these elements; not to the 
rock which resists the waves from age to age, nor to 
the wave which lashes incessantly the rock, but the 
superior beauty is with the oak which stands with 
its hundred arms against the storms of a century and 
gro\ys every year like a sapling; or the river which, 
ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age 
to age; or greatest of all, the man who has subsisted 
for years amid the changes of nature, yet has dis- 
tanced himself so that when you remember what he 
was and see what he is, you say, What strides! 
What a disparity is here! " 

The third number of The Dial's third volume was 
edited, in Emerson's absence, by Thoreau, and it 
contains, beside the regular departments, about two 
thirds the number of contributions boasted by its 
predecessor, and none of them notable excepting 
Emerson's lecture on The Transcendent alist and 
Thoreau's translation of the Prometheus Bound. 

The fourth number, opening with an elaborate 



1 46 IRalpb Malbo jemcreom 

descriptive and critical paper on the work of Mr. 
Alcott, is marked by two contributions, each of 
unique value for the purposes of any magazine, 
Transcendental or otherwise. One is an article on 
George Keats, including the remarks of John Keats 
upon Milton as scribbled on a fly-leaf of Milton's 
works; the other a collection of Observations " by 
Canova translated from Messerini's biography of him. 
in this number, also, is Emerson's fine paper on 
Europe and European Books — and the volume closes, 
not inappropriately, with the lines on friendship ex- 
tracted from Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose. If the 
magazine under Emerson's guidance breathed one 
spirit more than another throughout its pages, it was 
the kindness of temper and friendliness of tone which 
marked Emerson's relations, private and public, with 
the world about him. He could quote with the best 
of grace Chaucer's scrupulous warning to friendly 
souls, 

That there be non exceptioune 
Through changing of intention; 
That each help each other at her nede, 
And wisely hele both word and dede, 
True of meaning, devoid of slouth, 
For wit is nought without trouth. 

The fourth and last volume of The Dial opens with 
a long and elaborate discussion of the relative oppor- 
tunities of men and women, by Margaret Fuller, writ- 
ten like most of the reformatory articles of The Dial 
in a moderate and uncontroversial spirit, without the 
slightest tendency toward the ''screaming" which 



Zbc DiaL 147 

Emerson felt to be inseparable from special plead- 
ing. In fact, among the writings of the present day 
on the '' Woman Question " Miss Fuller's arguments 
would have the gentle sound of doves in quiet 
neighbourhoods, while the freedom she advocated 
was precisely that for which the most intelligent of 
her sex have laboured, the freedom to study and to 
use the opportunities offered by civilisation for the 
rounding of mind and character into symmetrical and 
ample forms. Her contribution, and the first part of 
a formidable review of Social Tendencies, by Charles 
Lane, left the number sufficiently equipped on the 
side of social questions, and the remainder of the 
articles consisted of poetry, essays, and literary re- 
views. Emerson's Rhea can hardly be compared 
with The Sphinx or Saadi for unalloyed poetic ele- 
ments, yet in contrast with the verse that surrounds 
it there is no lack of glowing imagination in its lines 
despite their disillusioning theoretic suggestion. His 
essay on Gifts in the same number has been one 
of the most widely quoted of his writings, and his 
criticism on Carlyle is in the first order. Nothing, in 
its way, could be better than this picture of Carlyle's 
mind at work with its material: 

''That morbid temperament has given to his 
rhetoric a somewhat bloated character, a luxury to 
many imaginative and learned persons, like a show- 
ery south wind with its sunbursts and rapid chasing 
of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its 
offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes 



148 IRalpb lHHalt)o lEmersom 

us often wish some concession were possible on the 
part of the humourist. Yet it must not be forgotten 
that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes 
with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers, — 
in all this glad and needful venting of his redundant 
spirits, — he does yet ever and anon, as if catching 
the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his 
tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level 
tone the very word, and then with new glee returns 
to his game. He is like a lover or an outlaw who 
wraps up his message in a serenade, which is non- 
sense to the sentinel but salvation to the ear for 
which it is meant. He does not dodge the question 
but gives sincerity where it is due." 

The following passage also must have struck 
oddly on the ear of the man who all his life ful- 
minated against poetry and derided the aesthetic 
faculty : 

'' Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in 
his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. 
Yet he is full of rhythm not only in the perpetual 
melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, 
and grand returns of his sense and music. What- 
ever thought or motto has once appeared to him 
fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him 
henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper 
tones and weightier import, now as promise, now 
as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic rever- 
beration, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next 
ages returned the sound." 



Zbc Wxnl 149 

From the next number all discussion of social 
needs and problems was excluded with the exception 
of Charles Lane's continuation of Sodal Tendencies 
and his short article on /I Day with the Shakers 
In A Winter Walk Thoreau's typical mood is 
delicately, even exquisitely, expressed, and Emer- 
son's essay on The Comic is ruddy with his finest 
humour, with that full-blooded delight in the vigor- 
ous exercise of the mind which he experienced in 
his best moments and which did not belong to his 
constitution. Writing in his journal of his lectures 
he complained of his inability to lay himself out 
utterly 'Marge, enormous, prodigal," upon each. 
'' Had 1 such energy that I could rally the lights and 
mights of sixty hours into twenty, I should hate 
myself less," he said, and he was right. Nobly 
conceived and effectively executed as all his finished 
product is, it is only at rare intervals, and chiefly in 
his poetry, that his mind seems to spring spon- 
taneously to its task, poised and muscular and free 
from weariness, not only powerful but instinct with 
the consciousness of power. At these times he is 
on equal terms with the old great masters who went 
joyously from masterpiece to masterpiece without 
waiting for nature to renew her nervous forces. 
From a certain physical languor he needed time and 
repose and the psychological moment for his self- 
revelation. The lusty Greek within was imprisoned 
by the Yankee frailty of body and only occasionally 
could show his brilliant perfection. But the essay 



I50 IRalpb Malbo lemereon^ 

on The Comic breathes hardy health and opulent 
enjoyment in every line. Where could one find 
a more enlightening glimpse of Emerson's mental 
attitude toward his environment of tense ethical 
effort than here : 

''There is no joke so true and deep in actual life 
as when some pure idealist goes up and down 
among the institutions of society attended by a man 
who knows the world, and who, sympathising with 
the philosopher's scrutiny, sympathises also with 
the confusion and indignation of the detected skulk- 
ing institutions. His perception of disparity, his eye 
wandering perpetually from the rule to the crooked 
lying thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with 
laughter." 

In this essay, too, as in so many others, we per- 
ceive Emerson's instantaneous grasp of the pictorial 
aspect of ideas, the plainer, no doubt, that here they 
are seen as caricature distinguished by a light facility. 
The intellect '' compares incessantly the sublime idea 
with the bloated nothing which pretends to be it, 
and the sense of disproportion is comedy. " ' ' Among 
the women in the street, you shall see one whose 
bonnet and dress are one thing, and the lady herself 
quite another, wearing withal an expression of meek 
submission to her bonnet and dress, and another 
whose dress obeys and heightens the expression of 
her form." ''No dignity, no learning, no force of 
character can make any stand against good wit. It 
is like ice on which no beauty of form, no majesty 



Zbc BiaL 151 

of carriage can claim any immunity, — they must 
walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down 
they must go, dignity and all." 

These passages and others like them suggest 
pictures to the mind, literally illustrate the thought, 
and this always is the case of Emerson in his spon- 
taneous writing. Nor does he forget to remind the 
reader that the comic has its relation to his doctrine 
of unity. There was never a definition closer to 
the fact than this, so simple and so unendingly 
suggestive : 

*'The perpetual game of humour is to look with 
considerate good-nature at every object in existence, 
aloof, as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it 
with the eternal whole ; enjoying the figure which 
each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the 
unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. 
Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a 
horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the 
connection of things, and contemplate it alone, 
standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once 
comic ; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue 
it from the ludicrous." 

When we consider how constantly his mind 
dwelt upon the synthesis of nature as the one way 
to beauty, how he bent upon all relative objects 
the comprehensive gaze of the artist, how without 
guidance or inspiration other than came from his 
own instincts he followed virtue by the flowery 
path of aesthetic appreciation, we can only echo the 



152 IRalpb Malt)o lemereom 

question of his Ode of Beauty which was printed 
next to his essay on The Comic : 

Who gave thee, O Beauty ! 
The keys of this breast, 
To thee who betrayed me 
To be ruined or blest ? 

and in the final couplet hear the cry of genius for the 
satisfaction of its need : 

Dread Power, but dear ! if God thou be, 
Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me ! 

The penultimate number of The Dial abjures 
almost entirely the intractable subject of reform and 
devotes itself to such purely literary subjects as 
the modern drama, the poetry of Homer, Ossian, 
Chaucer, and the translation of Dante. There is 
one article, by the faithful Charles Lane, on Brook 
Farm, such as might appear in any sober-minded 
magazine of the present day, but that is the only 
suggestion of iconoclastic influences shadowing The 
Dial from the body of reconstructive sentiment be- 
hind its sun-loving editor. 

In the next number the long article on Fourierism 
by Elizabeth Peabody leads the reader deftly through 
the mazes of that interesting but complex theme, 
and a notice of the Herald of Freedom, an anti- 
slavery journal, by Thoreau, strikes a sharp note of 
defiance to those whose sympathies ''the unpopular 
cause of freedom " had not reached. Emerson, also, 
in his address to The Young American called upon 



1 



^be Dial 153 

that various individual to obey his heart and be the 
nobility of the land : 

'' In every age of the world there has been a lead- 
ing nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose 
eminent citizens were willing to stand for the in- 
terests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of 
being called by the men of the moment, chimerical 
and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these 
States ? Which should lead that movement if not 
New England ? Who should lead the leaders, but 
the Young American." 

In the Centenary Edition of Emerson's works, Mr. 
Edward Emerson gives the instance of Charles Rus- 
sell Lowell, ''one of the young men valued by Mr. 
Emerson and moved by his teaching," as showing 
how young leaders of leaders triumphed in the cause 
of freedom by following the doctrines expressed in 
this essay, but that was still long in the future when 
The Dial closed its pages to its unremunerative 
public. 

Emerson's last contribution to it was the poem 
called The Visit, commencing — 

Askest, *' How long shalt thou stay?" 
Devastator of the day ! 

and ending- 
Speeding Saturn cannot halt ; 
Linger, — thou shalt rue the fault : 
If Love his moment overstay, 
Hatred's swift repulsions play. 



154 1?alpb Mal&o lEmereom 

It is not impossible that the little Dial was approach- 
ing that moment of destiny. At all events Emerson 
could no longer reconcile himself to permitting such 
devastation of the day, too short for the business of 
his life, and w^ith its sixteenth number The Dial went 
out of existence, singularly without honour in its own 
country, but the repository, nevertheless, of a few 
poems and essays which America must still con- 
sider the incomparable fruit of her sparsely strewn 
literature. 




1 



CHAPTER IX. 
EMERSON ABROAD. 

TOWARD the end of 1846, two years after the 
expiration of The Dial, Emerson received 
propositions from various quarters of Eng- 
land to lecture there, and after a number of months 
of indecision he set sail for Liverpool on the 5th of 
October, 1847. One of his reasons for seeking an 
English audience was to gain the criticism of a people 
less easily pleased than his countrymen and better 
equipped to call him to account. ''In the accept- 
ance that my papers find among my thoughtful 
countrymen in these days," he wrote in his candid 
journal, 'M cannot help seeing how limited is their 
reading. If they read only the books that I do, they 
would not exaggerate so wildly." No more bracing 
sentence could have been found to sustain one's 
belief in his dedication to the best in his art. 

He found an England no less ready than his Amer- 
ica to listen to his words, and in London his audi- 
ences drew from the highest levels of the social and 
literary worlds. Thackeray heard him, and the ac- 

155 



156 IRalpb Wnlt^o lEmereon. 

complished Duke of Argyll, and Douglas Jerrold, and 
William and Mary Howitt, and others more and less 
notable for intellectual performance. His first course 
of lectures was given at the Manchester Athen^um, 
and the subject was Representative Men. He him- 
self appeared to the English in the aspect of a repre- 
sentative man, and this country hardly could have 
had better fortune befall her than to be judged by his 
merits. During his stay, a letter in the London Ex- 
aminer urged a repetition of his lectures at prices low 
enough to admit the poor. '' I feel that it ought to 
be done," the writer says, '* because Emerson is a 
phenomenon whose like is not in the world, and to 
miss him is to lose an important, an informing fact, 
out of the nineteenth century. ... It seems 
also probable that a very large attendance of thought- 
ful men would be secured, and that Emerson's stir- 
rup-cup would be a cheering and full one, sweet and 
ruddy with international charity." In the composite 
portrait we gain of him as he stood in alien halls 
facing an unaccustomed public, this sweet and ruddy 
charity is the feature most clearly indicated. We 
hear also of his somewhat monotonous delivery, of his 
slight American accent, of his trick of gently rocking 
his body while speaking, of his indifference to the 
effect produced upon his audience, of his oval Yankee 
face, '' rather sallow and emaciated," and of his habit 
of gliding swiftly away the instant of finishing, with- 
out giving time for applause. Through the eyes of 
the Englishmen who attended his lectures we see 



% 



lEmeraon Hbroat)* 157 

him tall and thin and very blue-eyed, with in his face 
a combination of intelligence and sweetness that 
disarmed those who, like Crabbe Robinson, were 
prejudiced against him. Clough found him ''the 
quietest, plainest, unobtrusivest man possible," with 
looks and voice that gave ''the impression of perfect 
intellectual cultivation, as completely as would any 
great scientific man in England — Faraday or Owen, 
for example, — more in their way, perhaps, than in that 
of Wordsworth or Carlyle." William Rossetti noted 
his "upright figure, clear-cut physiognomy, clear 
elocution, resolved self-possession"; and Goodwin 
Barmby acknowledged him to be the most beautifully 
simple and clearest-minded man he had ever met, 
though he deemed that he needed social sympathy 
and its gospel of self-sacrifice to make him a whole 
man. In general his English friends seem to have rec- 
ognised in him nobility and sweetness and a certain 
pellucid quality of mind, together with a downright 
penetrating sincerity that won their respect. So far as 
they found him lacking it was in warmth of manner 
and richness of temperament — his Greek vitality 
not piercing to them through the sheath of his dry, 
impassive American presence. 

On his side he peered about like an etherealised 
Diogenes looking not for a man but for a spirit. The 
spiritual quality in the English, the vein of sensitive 
imagination, of deep personal sentiment, was not re- 
vealed to him. He missed it even in Thackeray, of 
whose books he read but one, Canity Fair, which 



158 IRalpb Malbo Cmeraon* 

inspired him with the notion that the most moral of 
novelists had come to the conclusion that we must 
*' renounce ideals and accept London." 

Unquestionably the English heart could not be 
worn upon a sleeve for even so tender and faithful 
an observer as Emerson to contemplate. He pon- 
dered traits and customs, and generalised his impres- 
sions with marvellous acuteness, but they lack — as 
he said of Fourier's system — one thing, Life. The 
great towns, the famous people, the social phenomena 
were too much a spectacle for even his penetrating 
faculty to probe their appearances to the innermost 
reality, and his account of them, so interesting and 
so intelligent, so truly learned and broadly based 
on large truths, is lacking in the quality he himself 
would have been the first to miss in a similar report 
of America and her people. It is not, to use his 
quaint phraseology, the report of a lover. 

In the hospitable English houses, over the gener- 
ous tables, he met Macaulay, brilliant, arrogant, and 
voluble; Dickens, author of what he designated as 
the poor Pickwick stuff; Stephenson, the old engi- 
neer, whom he considered '' in every way " the most 
remarkable man he had seen in England; De Quincey, 
then a ''very gentle old man," refined, deliberate, 
poor and plain; Rogers, Hallam, Leigh Hunt, Helps, 
Clough, Arnold, Patmore, Barry Cornwall, and 
George Cruikshank. Coleridge and Wordsworth 
and Landor he had seen on his earlier visit. Tenny- 
son he met at the house of Coventry Patmore, and 



f\ 



j£mcveon abroad* 159 

''was contented with him at once. . . . Quiet 
sluggish sense and thought, refined as all the English 
are, and good-humoured. " He visited beautiful Staf- 
ford House, and the event, which caused Carlyle "a 
certain internal amusement" at '"'such a conjunction 
of opposite stars," drew from Emerson the remark 
that in the little visit ''the two parts of Duchess and 
of Palace were well and truly played." " One would 
so gladly forget," he added, "that there was any- 
thing else in England than these golden chambers 
and the high and gentle people who walk in them! " 
He visited Oxford and had not a word to say of its 
grey and ancient beauty, but crowded his chapter 
with facts and statistics; and Winchester Cathedral 
impressed him chiefly by its dimensions. 

A second visit to Wordsworth found the old man 
asleep on his sofa, and, unlike the earlier meeting, 
this one was marked by no original recitation of his 
poetry. 

In all his wandering Emerson was shown the 
greatest consideration and esteem. "1 am every- 
where a guest," he wrote home. "Never call me 
solitary or Ishmaelite again. 1 began here by refus- 
ing invitations to staf at private houses, but now I 
find an invitation in every town, and accept it, to be 
at home." He wrote, too, that his admiration and 
his love of the English rose day by day though he 
withheld his sympathy. Carlyle greeted him with 
violent friendliness and welcome, sending a letter of 
invitation to house and hearth to be put in his hands 



i6o IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 

the moment he landed, and his sense of personal 
obligation to all his British hosts was so great that he 
earnestly charged his wife when a young Englishman 
visited them, to give him a fire in his bedroom and 
bread and wine before he went to bed, for if he were 
cold *Mt would chill my bones," he said, and if he 
were hungry it ''would make me hungry all my life, 
they have been so careful of me." 

It was precisely this consideration for material 
comfort, however, this practical talent for securing 
the essential elements of physical well-being, that 
made Emerson feel the difficulty of arriving at 
spiritual sources. Possibly he, so candid and ready 
to bestow his best upon his neighbour and to require 
the best in return, could not entirely realise the 
native shyness of the British temper in the presence 
of realities, the curious boyish reticence that keeps 
them from making of their own great woes or of 
their own great joys a little song. At all events it 
was with grateful warmth that he wrote of Clough 
and Froude, ''the monks of Oxford," who showed 
him not only kindest attentions, but themselves, in 
the main, the "brave young British man" showed 
him only the convenient formulas by which the 
secrets of heart and soul are most easily hidden: 

"A horizon of brass of the diameter of his 
umbrella shuts down around his senses. Squalid 
contentment with conventions, satire at the names 
of philosophy and religion, parochial and shop-till 
politics and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of life 



i 



iS<\ s» wo^"^ 




i6o 1 Cmcreon^ 

^ of person J i 

t that he 

Jishman 

om aiui 

„_. ..he were 

ly boneb, I IV ou.w, and if he 

would make me hungry all my life, 

t 1 so careful of me." 

It \v:is ely this consideration for material 

comfort, however, this practical talent for securing 
the essential elements of physical well-being, that 
made Emerson feel the difficulty of arriving at 
spiritual sources. Possibly he, so candid and ready 

to bestow hMp^AP'm(5^'MI/§^^^'' ^"^ t^ ''^^"''^ 
the hesX^i),^^^,^,^^^^),^^,,,},ji^^ realise the 
native shyn nper in the presence 

of :e that ke^ 

1 vvoes or ot 

their 4. At all events it 

of Cloui^'i 
d," who showed 

but themselves. In 

•'^ Rntish man "showed 
.1 luiuiuice by which the 
' most easily hidden* 
of the diameter oi 
vvn around his senses. S( 
ih co: ^. satire at the i 

of and religion, >chial and sh 

y of usagfe, betray the ebb ^ 



i 



jBmcvBon Hbroab. 16 1 

and spirit. As they trample on nationalities to re- 
produce London and Londoners in Europe and Asia, 
so they fear the hostility of ideas, of poetry, of 
religion, — ghosts which they cannot lay; and having 
attempted to domesticate and dress the Blessed Soul 
itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are 
tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that 
will sweep their system away. The artists say: 
'Nature puts them out'; the scholars have become 
unideal. They parry earnest speech with banter and 
levity; they laugh you down, or they change the 
subject. *The fact is,' they say over their wine, 
* all that about liberty, and so forth, is gone by; it 
won't do any longer.' The practical and comfort- 
able oppress them with inexorable claims, and the 
smallest fraction of power remains for heroism 
and poetry." 

Yet no doubt an opposite picture equally true 
might have been drawn of the English in Emerson's 
time, of which he himself might have asked as did 
the British auditor concerning his discourse on Plato, 
what connection it all had with the subject, to receive 
the same answer: ''None, my friend, save in God." 
In fact, that same year, a young Transcendental- 
ist was taking his Master's Degree at the London 
University, whose subsequent picture of England 
was to abound in high imagination, transmuting into 
the most rich and glowing poetry the solid material- 
ism of Lombard Street and the House of Lords. 

If, however, Emerson failed to discern through 



1 62 IRalpb Malbo lemeraon* 

the shell of English formality, — through what he 
characterised as the ''hard enamel" varnishing 
every part of the mature and finished Englishman, — 
the dreamy sensibility, the visionary faculty, pro- 
tected by it, he at least took home with him no vain 
or shallow thought concerning the people or the 
institutions he had studied. Dr. Richard Garnett in 
his admirable biography says of English Traits : 

*' Emerson is so little concerned with the fashion 
of the day, and so much with the solid foundations 
of English life that his book should endure as long as 
these do. It should be a mirror for England to con- 
sult from time to time, and see whether, in gaining 
the more spiritual look which Emerson missed, her 
countenance has lost any of the frankness and reso- 
luteness which he found." Contemplative of deep 
truths and haunted by the vision of spiritual graces, 
he had, nevertheless, a sure and seeing eye for the 
externals of human nature, and his description of the 
new phenomena engaging his attention, although it 
was full of quiet humour, had not, as Dr. Garnett 
punctiliously affirms, a single sneer or touch of venom 
in its occasional sarcasm. He saw the English as 
brothers and as the descendants of the great race of 
men from whom he had drawn so much of inspira- 
tion and joy; he moved among them taking notes for 
his own instruction and for that of his fellow 
Americans to whom then it was a more or less rare 
thing to visit Europe; and in the process sincerely 
and wisely undertaken he learned much about the 



I 



lemeraon abroad 163 

national character that ordinarily is discovered, if at 
all, only after years, not weeks, of familiar intercourse. 
At times, too, with his eyes fixed on those annoying 
established forms the inflexibility of which was not 
softened for him by their lovely vesture of human 
associations, he caught the sign of a life deeper than 
any he saw and was reminded of a beauty interior 
and sacred which cant and simony and sanctimony 
could not obliterate from the national soul. 

*' But the religion of England,— is it the Estab- 
lished Church ? no; is it the sects ? no; they are 
only perpetuations of some private man's dissent 
and are to the Established Church as cabs are to a 
coach, cheaper and more convenient, but really the 
same thing. Where dwells the religion ? Tell me 
first where dwells electricity or motion or thought or 
gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. Elec- 
tricity cannot be made fast, mortared up, and ended, 
like London Monument or the Tower, so that you 
shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the 
English do with their things, forevermore; it is pass- 
ing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, 
a surprise, a secret, which perplexes them and puts 
them out. Yet, if religion be the doing of all good, 
and for its sake the suffering of all evil, souffrir de 
tout le monde, et ne faire souffrir personne, that 
divine secret has existed in England from the days of 
Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson and of 
Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have 
no fame." 



1 64 IRalpb Malbo lEmereom 

It was a superb feat, from one point of view, for 
this home-keeping man, liking nothing so little as 
travel, to gather a traveller's harvest with such care- 
ful and skilful husbandry, and no reader of English 
Traits would guess the riddle of homesick mood and 
weary spirits that accounted for some of its lapses 
and omissions. He was oppressed by the sense of 
difference existing between the traditions of an Eng- 
lishman and those of an American, and possibly, also, 
by the sense which he had gone out to seek of stand- 
ing before a tribunal of high training and perfected 
culture. It followed naturally that in his private in- 
tercourse he was not quite the same as when in his 
own environment. Carlyle, who had come to dislike 
many of his opinions, spoke of his talent as ''not 
quite as high" as he had expected. ''We had im- 
mense talking with him here," he wrote, "but find 
that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon." 
Emerson's account of one of these occasions on which 
there was immense talking throws a certain light on 
the half part taken by him in the conversations. 
After visiting Stonehenge in company with Carlyle, 
he stopped at the house of Arthur Helps and spent 
there a rainy Sunday, which induced "much dis- 
course." 

" My friends asked whether there were any Amer- 
icans — any with an American idea — any theory of 
the right future of that country ? Thus challenged, 
I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, 
neither of presidents nor of cabinet ministers, nor of 






jemereon Hbroab^ 165 

such as would make of America another Europe. I 
thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said, 
'Certainly yes; — but those who hold it are fanatics 
of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to 
your English ears, to which it might be only ridicu- 
lous, — and yet it is the only true.' So 1 opened the 
dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and 
anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured 
a kind of hearing for it. I said: 'It is true that 1 have 
never seen in any country a man of sufficient valour 
to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that 
no less valour than this can command my respect.' " 

It is plain to every one that from this doctrine the 
mind of Carlyle could indeed get little cud to chew 
upon, and later, on the way to Winchester, when 
his friends plied him with questions as to the Amer- 
ican landscape and the American houses, his own 
house, for example, Emerson felt too keenly the lack 
of intimate acquaintance between the two countries 
to undertake description. ''Men of genius," says 
Bagehot, "with the impulses of solitude, produce 
works of art whose words can be read and re- 
read and partially taken in by foreigners to whom 
they could never be uttered, the very thought of 
whose unsympathising faces would freeze them on 
the surface of the mind." To this extent Emerson 
was a foreigner in England, even with the friend of 
his heart, and he could not reveal the charm of his 
country to those who did not love her fair wild face. 

"There, I thought, in America," he writes in his 



1 66 IRalpb TtWalbo lemereon. 

book of records, '' lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, 
almost conscious, too much by half for the man in 
the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the 
rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, 
steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; and on 
it man seems not able to make much impression. 
There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alle- 
ghany pastures, in the sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie, 
still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, 
long since driven away from the trim hedgerows and 
over-cultivated garden of England. And, in England, 
I am quite too sensible of this. Every one is on his 
good behaviour and must be dressed for dinner at six. 
So 1 put off my friends with very inadequate details 
as best 1 could." 

Thus Emerson's great personal charm and lovable 
presence fought against odds to win the affections of 
the English. Carlyle, in a letter to his sister, depicts 
him at one of the London dinners with ''quantities 
of Lords, Townwits (Thackeray, &c.), and beautiful 
ladies," as keeping ''very quiet, mild modest eyes, 
lips sealed together like a pair of pincers, and nobody 
minded him much." A writer in Blackwood* s Maga- 
:(ine, who was present at one of these dinners, the 
one whither De Quincey was coerced by secret plot- 
ting, expresses his surprise that the American philo- 
sopher did not philosophise in public, but chatted of 
small things in a simple way. It was his instinctive 
resource in associating with persons whom he found 
"rich, plain, polite, proud, and admirable," who 



jEmereon Hbroab* 167 

nevertheless failed to appeal to his imagination. But 
he parted from them with warmth of feeling on 
both sides. He ''had not been aware there was so 
much kindness in the world/' he said. That he had 
made his impression on liberal hearts has been evi- 
denced in many ways, and when tidings reached 
England that his house had been burned down, his 
friends in that country expressed their desire to join 
with his friends at home in helping to rebuild it. 

Before he returned, he spent twenty-five days in 
Paris, which he liked better than London. He wrote 
home that he had all winter been admiring the Eng- 
lish and disparaging the French and was then correct- 
ing his impressions. He liked the cleanly beauty of 
Paris, the gayety and good-humour of the crowds in 
the midst of revolution, the fire and fury of the peo- 
ple discussing social questions, and he found the 
universal good-breeding a " great convenience.'* It 
was June when he returned to England to finish his 
lectures there and take back with him to America 
''a contentedness with home " sufficient for the rest 
of his days. 

He had given in England the very best of his de- 
veloped thought. He had lectured on the Mind and 
Manners of the XIX. Century, on the Powers and 
Laws of Thought, the Relation of Intellect to Natural 
Science, the Tendencies and Duties of Men of 
Thought, on Politics and Socialism, on Poetry and 
Eloquence, Natural Aristocracy, Representative Men, 
and Domestic Life. It does not appear that his 



1 68 IRalpb IHHal&o iBmcvBon. 

audiences felt themselves specifically enlightened, 
though the more responsive felt themselves stimu- 
lated. His most captious reviewer found him ''sug- 
gestive." But his influence was of the kind that 
gathers weight with time. Mr. Julian Hawthorne 
speaks of a Lord Mayor who wished to meet him be- 
cause his essay on Self-Reliance had started him on 
the road to success, and of a Coroner of London who 
carried the Essays about with him through many 
years. These were isolated examples of an effect 
diffused through the unliterary as well as the literary 
regions of society, an effect which has grown in Eng- 
land as well as in America until, if Emerson could 
walk once more among us, we should find that only 
a small proportion of reading men of the present gen- 
eration had escaped his direct or indirect influence. 
Matthew Arnold wrote sadly in his volume of the 
Essays : 

"O monstrous, dead, unprofitable world! 
• That thou canst hear, and hearing, hold thy way. 
A voice oracular hath pealed to-day. 
To-day a hero's banner is unfurled. 
Hast thou no lip for welcome ? " So I said. 
Man after man, the world smiled and passed by, 
A smile of wistful incredulity, 
As though one spake of noise unto the dead: 
Scornful and strange and sorrowful, and full 
Of bitter knowledge. 

But the world is neither dead nor unprofitable, and 
it was one of Emerson's highest qualities that he 
consistently perceived its capacity for progress along 



lemereon abroa&* 169 

spiritual paths. As with individuals, he courteously 
assumed its interest in ''starry wisdom " such as he 
offered it. 

When he was once more in America, he naturally 
lectured at once upon England to an eager public, 
and, naturally too, considering the time and his com- 
paratively untravelled audience, he put into his lec- 
tures much positive information and illustration of 
his impressions. They resembled family letters, in 
which it was taken for granted that the writer was 
speaking for intimates and not for criticism. After 
seven years the lectures were pruned and prepared 
for the Press, their general form and content remain- 
ing unchanged. It was then that the English knew 
how the quiet gentleman whom they had cordially 
honoured had regarded them, and it was to their 
credit as much as to Emerson's that they accepted in 
such good temper the salient, sincere, and not wholly 
adequate picture whose features they frankly recog- 
nised as belonging to the national countenance. 
Carlyle declared that English Traits was worth all 
the books ever written by New England upon the 
Old. ''We do very well with it here," he added, 
" and the wise part of us besV 

There was, however, one old man at Bath to 
whom English Traits was an occasion for character- 
istic and not entirely flattering utterance. In the 
first part of the book, Emerson had gone back three 
and twenty years to his first European journey. At 
that time he had gone down to visit Landor at his 



I70 IRalpb MalJ)o Cmersom 

Villa Gherardesca under his fig-trees on the southern 
slope of the Fiesolan hills, and had found him '' noble 
and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures " and free 
from the ''Achillean wrath," the ''untamable petu- 
lance," which he had inferred from his books and 
from anecdotes about him. The conversation dur- 
ing that visit and a subsequent one is now widely 
known, as Emerson reported it. Landor admired 
Washington, declared that no great man ever had a 
son, unless it were Philip and Alexander, and Philip 
he called the greater man. In art he said that he 
loved the Greeks, and in sculpture them only. He 
preferred John of Bologna to Michael Angelo; in 
painting he preferred Raphael; and shared the grow- 
ing taste for Perugino and the early masters. "The 
Greek histories he thought the only good; and after 
them Voltaire's. I could not make him praise Mack- 
intosh, nor my more recent friends; Montaigne very 
cordially, — and Charron also, which seemed un- 
discriminating. He thought Degerando indebted to 
* Lucas on Happiness ' ! and ' Lucas on Holiness ' ! 
He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey ? 
. . . He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than 
was necessary, and undervalued Burke, and under- 
valued Socrates; designated as three of the great- 
est of men, Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon, — 
much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the 
three or the six best pears ' for a small orchard ' ; — 
and did not even omit to remark the similar termina- 
tion of their names. . . . 1 had visited Professor 



1 



jemereon Hbroab* 171 

Amici, who had shown me his microscopes, mag- 
nifying (it was said) two thousand diameters; and 
I spoke of the uses to which they were applied. 
Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same 
breath, said, 'the sublime was in a grain of dust.' 
I suppose I teased him about recent writers, but he 
professed never to have heard of Herschel, not 
even by name.'' At the end of his account Emerson 
added: ''Landor is strangely undervalued in Eng- 
land ; usually ignored and sometimes savagely at- 
tacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right 
or wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after 
year the scholar must still go back to Landor for a 
multitude of elegant sentences; for wisdom, wit, and 
indignation that are unforgetable." 

When Landor read these words, the passion for 
correction that once had led him to make upward of 
a thousand notes of faults of grammar and expres- 
sion in two or three of Scott's volumes inspired him 
to write and publish an open letter to Emerson, in 
which he contradicted or emended a number of the 
statements he had made. English reviewers were 
inclined to read into the letter both more wit and 
more indignation than are conspicuous to the Ameri- 
can reader. Landor's irritation was of the mildest 
so far as its expression went, and in the course of 
the letter he falls into a tone of pleasant gossip upon 
an always interesting theme. It would be difficult 
to match in candid naivete his statement of his own 
valuation by critics of authority. But the entire 



172 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 

document is eloquent of his tremendous paradoxical 
personality. The passages most closely connected 
with Emerson's innocent mistakes exhibit his quin- 
tessential egoism, but were written, one may con- 
sistently believe, not in a spirit of petulance, but on 
behalf of that lovely truth so long worshipped in 
his art: 

'*My Dear Sir, 

'' Your English Traits have given me great pleas- 
ure; and they would have done so even if 1 had 
been treated by you with less favour. The short 
conversations we held at my Tuscan Villa were in- 
sufficient for an estimate of my character and opin- 
ions. A few of these, and only a few, of the least 
important, 1 may have modified since. Let me run 
briefly over them as I find them stated in your 
pages. Twenty-three years have not obliterated 
from my memory the traces of your visit, in com- 
pany with that intelligent man and glorious sculptor, 
who was delegated to erect a statue in your capital 
to the tutelary genius of America. 1 share with him 
my enthusiastic love of ancient art; but I am no ex- 
clusive, as you seem to hint 1 am. In my hall at 
Fiesole there are two busts, if you remember, by two 
artists very unlike the ancients, and equally unlike 
each other: Donatello and Fiamingo; surveying them 
at a distance is the sorrowful countenance of Ger- 
manicus. Sculpture at the present day flourishes 
more than it ever did since the age of Pericles; and 



'jTP-'-T^. 



K *i-vJv 




' on 
)ed in 



"A 

h Traits have given me great pleas- 

! i they would have done so even if I had 

I treated by you with less favour. The short 

rr nvprsations we held ai ., Tuscan Villa were 

.ent {§Fm^Mm^^^^^^^^^^ opiu- 

A f^. From a photograph bj/ A. Hosmer. ^- r xi_ i ^ 

the least 

e run 



lii liiy Hull ai 
mber, b 

surv^ 

, lance oi 
day fl 

of P( 



1 



jEmereon Hbroab* 173 

America is not cast into the shade by Europe. I do 
prefer Giovanni da Bologna to Michael Angelo, who 
indeed in the conception is sublime, but often incor- 
rect, and sometimes extravagant, both in sculpture 
and painting. I confess 1 have no relish for his 
prodigious giblet pie in the Capella Sistina, known 
throughout the world as his Last Judgment. Grand 
in architecture, he was no ordinary poet, no luke- 
warm patriot. Deplorable, that the inheritor of his 
house and name is so vile a sycophant that even 
the blast of Michael's trumpet could not rouse his 
abject soul. 

*M am an admirer of Pietro Perugino, and more 
than an admirer of Raffaello; but I could never rank 
the Madonna delta Saggiola among the higher of his 
works; 1 see no divinity in the child, and no such 
purity in the Virgin as he often expressed in her. I 
have given my opinion as freely on the Transfigura- 
tion, The cartoons are his noblest works ; they 
place him as high as is Correggio in the Dome of 
Parma; nothing has been, or is likely to be, higher. 



''We will now walk a little way out of the gal- 
lery. Let mie say, before we go farther, that 1 do 
not think ' the Greek historians the only good ones.' 
Davila, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Michelet, have afforded 
me much instruction and much delight. Gibbon is 
worthy of a name among the most enlightened and 
eloquent of the ancients. I find no fault in his 



174 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon- 

language; on the contrary, I find the most exact pro- 
priety. The grave, and somewhat austere, becomes 
the historian of the Roman Republic; the grand, and 
somewhat gorgeous, finds its proper place in the 
palace of Byzantium. Am 1 indifferent to the merits 
of our own historians ? indifferent to the merits of him 
who balanced with equal hand Wellington and Na- 
poleon ? No; I glory in my countryman and friend. 
Is it certain that I am indiscriminating in my judg- 
ment on Charron ? Never have I compared him 
with Montaigne; but there is much of wisdom, and, 
what is remarkable in the earlier French authors, 
much of sincerity in him. 

'M am sorry to have 'pestered you with Southey/ 
and to have excited the inquiry, ' 1/Vho is Southey ? ' 
I will answer the question. Southey is the poet 
who has written the most imaginative poem of any 
in our own times, English or continental; such is 
the Curse of Kehama, Southey is the proseman who 
has written the purest prose; Southey is the critic 
the most cordial and the least invidious. Show me 
another, of any note, without captiousness, without 
arrogance, and without malignity. 

'''Slow rises worth by poverty deprest.' But 
Southey raised it. 

"Certainly you could not make me praise Mack- 
intosh. What is there eminently to praise in him ? 
Are there not twenty men and women at the present 
hour who excel him in style and genius ? His read- 
ing was excessive: he had much capacity, less com- 



jEmereon Hbroab, 175 

prehensiveness and concentration. I know not who 
may be the ' others of your recent friends ' whom 
you could not excite me to applaud. I am more 
addicted to praise than censure. We English are 
generally as fierce partisans in literary as in parlia- 
mentary elections, and we cheer or jostle a candi- 
date of whom we know nothing. 1 have always 
kept clear of both quarters. I have votes in three 
counties, I believe 1 have in four, and never gave 
one. I would rather buy than solicit or canvass, but 
preferably neither. Nor am 1 less abstinent in the 
turbulent contest for literary honours. Among the 
many authors you have conversed with in England, 
did you find above a couple who spoke not ill of all 
the rest ? Even the most liberal of them, they who 
concede the most, subtract at last the greater part of 
what they have conceded, together with somewhat 
beside. And this is done, forsooth, out of fairness, 
truthfulness, &c. 



'' We now come to Carlyle, of whom you tell us 
* he worships a man that will manifest any truth to 
him.' Would he have patience for the truth to be 
manifested ? or would he accept it then ? Certainly, 
the face of truth is very lovely, and we take especial 
care that it shall never lose it[s] charms by famili- 
arity. He declares that ' Landor's principle is mere 
rebellion.' 

'' Quite the contrary is apparent and prominent 



176 IRalpb Mal5o iBmcveon. 

in many of my writings. I always was a Conserva- 
tive; but 1 would eradicate any species of evil, politi- 
cal, moral, or religious, as soon as it springs up, with 
no reference to the blockheads who cry out, ' I4^hat 
would you substitute in its place ?' When 1 pluck 
up a dock or a thistle, do 1 ask any such a question ? 
I have said plainly, more than once, and in many 
quarters, that 1 would not alter or greatly modify the 
English Constitution. I denounced at the time of its 
enactment the fallacy of the Reform Bill. And here 
1 beg pardon for the word fallacy, instead of humbug, 
which entered into our phraseology with two other 
sister graces. Sham and Pluck. 1 applaud the ad- 
mission of new peers; and 1 think it well that a large 
body of them should be hereditary. But it is worse 
than mere popery that we should be encumbered by 
a costly and heavy bench of cardinals under the title 
of Bishops, and that their revenues should exceed 
those in the Roman States. I would send a beadel 
after every Bishop who left his diocese, without the 
call of his Sovran, the head of the Church, for some 
peculiar and urgent purpose relating to it solely. I 
would surround the throne with splendour and mag- 
nificence, and grant as large a sum as a thousand 
pounds weekly for it with two palaces; no land but 
what should be rented. The highest of the nobility 
would be proud of service under it, without the pay 
of menials. I approve the expansion of our peerage; 
but never let its members, adscititious or older, 
think themselves the only nobility; else peradven- 



ture some of them may be reminded that there are 
among us men whose ancestors stood in high places, 
and who did good service to the country, when 
theirs were cooped up within borough walls, or 
called on duty from the field as serfs and villains. 

''Democracy, such as yours in America is my 
abhorrence. Republicanism far from it; but there are 
few nations capable of receiving, fewer of retaining, 
this pure and efficient form. Democracy is lax and 
disjointed; and whatever is loose wears out the 
machine. 



'' I never glorified Lord Chesterfield; yet he surely 
is among the best of our writers in regard to style, 
and appears to have formed Horace Walpole's and 
Sterne's, a style purely English. His letters were 
placed by Beresford, Archbishop of Tuam, in the 
hands of his daughters. This 1 remember to have 
been stated to me by his son. A polished courtier, 
and a virtuous prelate knew their value; and per- 
haps the neglect of them at the present day is one 
reason why a gentleman is almost as rare as a man 
of genius. 

'M am not conscious that 1 underrate Burke: 
never have I placed any of his parliamentary con- 
temporaries in the same rank with him. His lan- 
guage is brilliant, but not always elegant; which 
induced me once to attribute to him the Letters of 
Junius, 1 am now more inclined to General Lee as 



178 IRalpb Malbo lemereom 

author. Lord Nugent, an inquisitive and intelligent 
reader, told me he never could 'worm out the 
secret ' from his uncle Mr. Thomas Grenville, who, 
he believed, knew it. Surely it is hardly worth 
the trouble of a single hour's research. We have 
better things weekly in the Examiner, and daily in 
the Times, 

'M do not 'undervalue Socrates.' Being the 
cleverest of the Sophists, he turned the fraternity 
into ridicule; he eluded the grasp of his antagonist 
by anointing with the oil of quibble all that was 
tangible and prominent. To compare his philosophy 
(if indeed you can catch it) with the philosophy of 
Epicurus and Epictetus, whose systems meet, is 
insanity. 

'M do not 'despise entomology.' 1 am ignorant 
of it; as indeed 1 am of almost all science. 

'' 1 love also flowers and plants ; but I know less 
about them than is known by a beetle or a butterfly. 

'' I must have been misunderstood, or have been 
culpably inattentive if 1 said ' 1 knew not Herschell 
[sic] by name.' The father's 1 knew well, from his 
giving to a star the baptismal one of that pernicious 
madman who tore America from England, and who 
rubbed his hands when the despatches announced 
to him the battle of Bunker's Hill, in which he told 
his equerry that his soldiers had 'got well pep- 
pered.' Probably I had not then received in Italy 
the admirable writings of the great Herschell's 
greater son. 



jemeraon Hbroab. 179 

*' Phocion, who excites as much of pity as of ad- 
miration, was excellent as a commander and as an 
orator, but was deficient and faulty as a politician. 
No Athenian had, for so long a period, rendered to 
his country so many and such great services. He 
should have died a short time earlier; he should 
have entered the temple with Demosthenes. On 
the whole, 1 greatly prefer this last consistent man, 
although he could not save his country like Epami- 
nondas and like Washington. 

'' I make no complaint of what is stated in the 
following page, that ' Landor is strangely under- 
valued in England.' I have heard it before, but I 
have never taken the trouble to ascertain it. Here I 
find that I am 'savagely attacked in the Reviews.' 
Nothing more likely; I never see them; my acquain- 
tances lie in a different and far distant quarter. 
Some honours have, however, been conferred on me 
in the literary world. Southey dedicated to me his 
Kehama ; James his Attila ; he and Dickens invited 
me to be godfather to their sons. Moreover, I think 
as many have offered me the flatteries of verse as 
ever were offered to any other one but Louis the 
Fourteenth. 



*' Accept this memorial, which your name will 
render of less brief duration, of the esteem in which 
you are held by 

'* Walter Landor." 



i8o IRalpb TKHal&o Emereom 

The qualities enumerated in Emerson's picture 
of the typical Englishman are many in number, and 
few of them appear to be the product of preliminary 
reading. His impressions, in the main certainly, 
seem to have been formed on the spot and singularly 
uninfluenced by the observations of others. On the 
side of merit he placed the logical temper of mind 
which he found in the Englishman, his resolution to 
see fair play, his self-respect, and above all his pluck; 
his affection and loyalty, his cleanliness and simplic- 
ity, his sincerity, his gravity, and good taste, his frank 
hospitality and his power of performance. On the 
other side went his inaccessibility to new ideas, his 
conceit, the ''wooden prose" that rules his action, 
his tendency toward fixed forms and the sanction of 
tradition, his national arrogance and insular limita- 
tion, his suppression of the imagination and substitu- 
tion of standards of comfort and utility for higher 
standards. Emerson in defining these traits used 
more than usually incisive characterisation and some 
of his phrases knock on the mind like the strokes of 
a hammer in a skilful hand: ''The Englishman has 
accurate perceptions; takes hold of things by the 
right end, and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. 
. . . He must be treated with sincerity and 
reality ; with muffins and not the promise of 
muffins." " If a bishop meets an intelligent gentle- 
man and reads fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has 
no resource but to take wine with him." The 
Englishman "hides no defect of his form, features, 



t 



)£mer0on Hbroab* i8i 

dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks every 
circumstance belonging to him comes recommended 
to you." ''Nothing savage, nothing mean, resides 
in the English heart." ''A saving stupidity masks 
and protects their perception, as the curtain of the 
eagle's eye." ''To be king of their word is their 
pride." There may be difference of opinion as to 
the truth of these observations, but they are incon- 
testably not trite. Occasionally the difference in 
" manners," never a negligible quantity with him, 
provoked him to a mild ferocity of complaint. The 
English, he says, " have no curiosity about foreign- 
ers, and answer any information you may volunteer 
with ' Oh ! Oh ! ' until the informant makes up his 
mind that they shall die in their ignorance, for any 
help he will offer." At the end of his book, how- 
ever, Emerson printed the speech he made shortly 
after his arrival at Manchester, as sufficiently agree- 
ing with the deliberate result of the acquaintance 
with England recorded on his foregoing pages. In the 
minds of experienced diners-out it holds its place as 
the most remarkable after-dinner speech in English an- 
nals. In it he dwells upon the two qualities that made 
England the dearest of countries to him after his own. 
"That which lures a solitary American in the 
woods with the wish to see England," he says, " is 
the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race, — its com- 
manding sense of right and wrong, the love and 
devotion to that,— this is the imperial trait, which 
arms them with the sceptre of the globe. 



1 82 IRalpb Mal&o lemer^on, 

*Mt is this which lies at the foundation of that 
aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into 
strange vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sight 
of, but which, if it should lose this, would find itself 
paralysed; and in trade and in the mechanic's shop 
gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness 
and solidity of work which is a national characteris- 
tic. This conscience is one element, and the other is 
that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that 
homage of man to man, running through all classes, 
— the electing of worthy persons to a certain frater- 
nity, to acts of kindness and warm and stanch 
support, from year to year, from youth to age, — 
which is alike lovely and honourable to those who 
render and those who receive it; which stands in 
strong contrast with the superficial attachments of 
other races, their excessive courtesy and short-lived 
connection." 

It is this that we may as well accept as his most 
enduring mood toward England. It was the home 
of literature and morality to him, and what he chided 
was no more than Wordsworth and Arnold saw to 
chide, less than had inflamed the mind of Milton to 
vast expostulation. 




CHAPTER X. 
REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

UPON his return to America, Emerson carried 
his lectures into what was then the Far 
West, finding in the raw atmosphere of the 
newly civilised region ample contrast to the ''over- 
cultivated garden " of England. In going from Phila- 
delphia to Pittsburgh he spent two nights in the 
cars, and the third on the floor of a canal boat where 
the cushion allowed him for a bed was crossed at the 
knees, he said, by another tier of sleepers as long- 
limbed as he, ''so that in the air was a wreath of 
legs." In Illinois he dwelt in cabins, and in Michigan 
rode in a buggy forty-eight miles to his lecture and 
twenty more after its delivery. He crossed the Mis- 
sissippi in a rowboat with only a man and a boy for 
oarsmen, when much of the rowing was on the sur- 
face of fixed ice in default of running water, and he 
faced audiences that rose and walked out of the hall 
when he failed to interest them. They were made, 
however, of no stouter stuff than he, and his work 

gained force and body from his rough experience. 

183 



1 84 IRalpb Malbo lemersom 

As in England he found much kindness, bringing 
much to meet it. He was at the height of his power, 
and his lectures on the Conduct of Life which were 
written at this time have a ring of decision and a 
firmness of texture, won no doubt from well-knit 
England and the positive West. He turned his 
own discomforts and the rough life with which he 
came into contact into cheerful arguments for their 
value. Such a passage as this must have fallen pleas- 
antly on the ears of those who ''drank the wild 
air's salubrity " west of the Mississippi: 

''A Fifth Avenue landlord, a West End house- 
holder, is not the highest style of man; and though 
good hearts and sound minds are of no condition, 
yet he who is to be wise for many must not be pro- 
tected. He must know the huts where poor men 
lie, and the chores which poor men do. The first- 
class minds, /tsop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shakespeare, 
Franklin, had the poor man's feeling and mortifica- 
tion. A rich man was never insulted in his life, but 
this man must be stung. A rich man was never in 
danger from cold or hunger or war or ruffians, — and 
you can see he was not from the moderation of his 
ideas. 'T is a fatal disadvantage to be cockered and 
eat too much cake. What tests of manhood could 
he stand ? Take him out of his protections. He is 
a good bookkeeper, or he is a shrewd adviser in the 
insurance office; perhaps he could pass a college ex- 
amination, and take his degrees; perhaps he can give 
wise counsel in a court of law. Now plant him down 



IRepreeentative fIDem 185 

among farmers, firemen, Indians, and emigrants. 
Set a dog on him; set a highwayman on him; try 
him with a course of mobs; send him to Kansas, to 
Pike's Peak, to Oregon; and if he have true faculty, 
this may be the element he wants, and he will come 
out of it with broader wisdom and manly power. 
y€sop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have been taken 
by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and knew 
the realities of human life." 

From his European experience he deduced no 
moral for his countrymen except to stay at home. 
'' 1 am not much of an advocate for travelling," he 
said, *'and I observe that men run away to other 
countries because they are not good in their own, and 
run back to their own because they pass for nothing 
in the new places. ... He that does not fill a 
place at home cannot abroad. He only goes there 
to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do 
not think you will find anything there which you 
have not seen at home ? The stuff of all countries is 
just the same. Do you suppose there is any coun- 
try where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle 
the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the 
fish ? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. 
And let him go where he will, he can only find so 
much beauty or worth as he carries." Admirable 
doctrine, had every man been an Emerson, yet even 
he had gained from mixing with a larger crowd. 
There is evidence in all his after-work of a tendency 
to stand firmer on the ground. The ''mettle and 



i86 IRalpb IHHalbo lemereott 

bottom " which he found in the English character 
was sufficiently present in his own, and henceforth 
was treated with more indulgence and given a 
more equal share with his idealism. His writing 
became more corporeal without losing its spiritual 
quality. 

His immediate literary task upon his return from 
England was the collection of his separate addresses 
and Nature in one volume. In 1850 he published his 
lectures on Representative Men, in which he appears 
as a critic of literature and life in the definite and 
limited sense commonly given to the word. 

It is a commonplace of popular opinion that a 
poet is not a good critic. In the presence of genius 
he is the best. With genius he can deal openly and 
directly. It is not necessary to ''compare, com- 
pare," the essential thing is to comprehend with 
sympathy, to illumine and interpret. Intuitive criti- 
cism in the hands of a critic who is nothing more 
becomes a ridiculous affair. For a second-rate mind 
to cast aside the accumulated standards of centuries 
and trust to individual judgment for the placing of a 
talent invites laughter and contempt. Scientific criti- 
cism based on irksome study and careful measuring 
is the only refuge for the professional arbiter at work 
upon the comparatively mean product of ordinary 
intelligences. But, confronted with a masterpiece, 
all systems of criticism become in their turn some- 
what ridiculous. The creative mind is summoned to 
construe the riddle of creation, and in the meeting 



IReprcaentative flDem 187 

of original faculties one feels at least the stir of dis- 
covery, the tingling thrill of adventure in unexplored 
regions. Whatever results, it will be the uncommon, 
the unforeseen, the hidden, and the genuine, that is 
revealed by this calling of deep unto deep. Instead 
of the laborious effort of weakness and incapacity 
to reach the point of understanding, we have the 
easy movement of equal powers, keeping pace with- 
out difficulty or weariness. 

''Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shake- 
speare," says Emerson, adding "and even he can 
tell us nothing except to the Shakespeare in us, that 
is to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour." 
To consider the Shakespeare of Emerson, the most 
creative and imaginative of any of the seven essays 
on Representative Men, is to be instantly aware of a 
simplicity and humanity in the highest degree un- 
usual, if not unprecedented, among the works of the 
multitudinous Shakespearean critics of two centuries. 
In no other instance has that complex splendour of 
performance been so inexorably reduced to the simple 
structure of a few fundamental properties. What 
audacity, for example, in attempting to realise Shake- 
speare by co-ordinating his characteristics with the 
aid of but one quotation from his works, and that 
the most abstract, indefinite, and mysterious he could 
readily have found: 

What may this mean 
That thou dead corse again in complete steel 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon ? 



1 88 IRalpb UGlal&o lemereon. 

Piercing through the compact body of poetry and 
drama to the personality whose relation to the work 
is the essential matter with him, Emerson draws a 
bold and beautiful outline of the great master, leav- 
ing us to debate the likeness and search out the 
sources of the impression. All his life a lover and 
student of Shakespeare, he gathered into a few pages 
the result of his meditation. It has been criticised 
as a singularly slight performance to spring from such 
extended preparation, and, truly, German critics and 
members of Shakespearean societies would find some 
difficulty in discovering what this extraordinary reader 
had done with his time. He had done what the 
modern sculptor Rodin would have done in his place. 
He had ''possessed" his subject for the purpose of 
showing intensely and with absence of all negligible 
detail, its poetic interest. Shakespeare, the Poet, he 
calls his essay, and the poet only is hewn out for 
us from the bewildering exuberance of the material. 
And what is the effect ? That we forget the unique 
character of the genius discussed and see it as one 
of the exalting possibilities of human life, as the 
demonstration that no performance is too divine or 
too singular to be emulated or surpassed; surely the 
most enchanting, the most consoling, the most uplift- 
ing conviction to enter the human heart. 

The essay opens with the recognition of the debt 
genius owes to the past. '' Every master has found 
his materials collected, and his power lay in his sym- 
pathy with his people and in his love of the mate- 



IRepreeentative fiDem 189 

rials he wrought in. What an economy of power! 
and what a compensation for the shortness of life! 
All is done to his hand. The world has brought 
him thus far on his way. The human race has gone 
out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows and 
bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, 
women, all have worked for him, and he enters into 
their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the 
line of tendency, out of the national feeling and his- 
tory, and he would have all to do for himself, his 
powers would be expended in the first preparations. 
Great genial power, one would almost say, consists 
in not being original at all; in being altogether recep- 
tive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the 
spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the 
mind." Against this background, somewhat elabor- 
ated and filled in with statements not wholly accu- 
rate, of the literature from which Elizabethan writers 
through Chaucer derived, appears the figure of Shake- 
speare, massive, prodigious, yet mild and beautiful. 
The quality to which all more particular details are 
related is the lack of peculiarity and ostentation. 
" He has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells 
greatly, the small subordinately. He is wise with- 
out emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is 
strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes with- 
out effort and by the same rule as she floats a bubble 
in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. 
This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, 
narrative, and love songs ; a merit so incessant 



I90 IRalpb XPHal&o j£mcveon. 

that each reader is incredulous of the perception 
of other readers." This is the key, the right key, of 
unliterary criticism. The attributes chosen are se- 
lected not for their literary but for their tempera- 
mental value, and suggest with subtle vagueness a 
pervading quality of temperament. At one with the 
best of the modern Shakespearean critics, Emerson 
finds Shakespeare's whole individuality incorporated 
in his writings. ''What trait of his private mind 
has he hidden in his dramas ? " he asks; and answers, 
'' One can discern in his ample pictures of the gen- 
tleman and the king, what forms and humanities 
pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large 
hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let War- 
wick, let Antonio the merchant answer for his great 
heart. So far from Shakespeare's being the least 
known, he is the one person, in all modern history, 
known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of 
economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the 
conduct of life, has he not settled ? What mystery 
has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, 
or function, or district of man's work has he not re- 
membered ? What king has he not taught state, 
as Talma taught Napoleon ? What maiden has not 
found him finer than her delicacy ? What lover has 
he not outloved ? What sage has he not outseen ? 
What gentleman has he not instructed in the rude- 
ness of his behaviour ? " 

The imagination of the reader is obliged to assent 
to this unsupported description, strictly Emersonian 



IRepreeentatlve fiDen. 191 

in its direct dealing with the results of careful think- 
ing and its avoidance of all processes. In the pages 
following one quality is somewhat more precisely 
distinguished from another; the totality of impression 
in the sonnets, the carrying over of the meaning from 
line to line in the speeches of the plays are men- 
tioned; the perfect transformation of experience into 
poetic expression is dwelt upon, and the sovereign 
cheerfulness of the '' true bard " receives its ardent 
tribute; but there is nowhere anything to suggest 
formal criticism, based upon textual comment and 
analysis. Yet it is not emotional criticism either. 
The remark made by Dr. Holmes upon Emerson's 
literary judgments, that he holds the mirror up to his 
hero at just such an angle that we see his own face 
as well, is a clever statement of an obvious truth, but 
it conveys an impression of idiosyncrasy not entirely 
justified. In his Shakespeare, for example, we see 
not so much the face and expression of Emerson's 
own nature as the body of ideas from which his ideal 
was composed, and by which he tested all subjects 
that came under his observation. His individual yet 
classic standard was applied with consistent fidelity, 
and he escaped thus the danger of whimsical dis- 
crimination. That he attended to the larger relations 
of his subject and was chary of detail does not mean 
that he invented his descriptions to suit his predilec- 
tions. If they are vague they are none the less 
founded on observation as acute and well considered 
as the most meticulous annotator could desire. 



192 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 

Indeed Dr. George Brandes, one of the latest and most 
learned of the Shakespearean ''scholars," quotes 
''that keen observer, Emerson" as having drawn 
attention to the two entirely different rhythms used 
in Henry Vlll., the one Shakespearean, the other 
much inferior. The passage is an excellent example 
of Emerson's efficiency when he sets his mind to the 
analysis of specific facts, and shows clear under- 
standing of poetic distribution of stress, as indeed it 
should, Emerson in his finer poems exercising that 
art with rare skill. "In Henry Vlll.," he says: "1 
think I see plainly the cropping out of the original 
rock on which his (Shakespeare's) own finer stratum 
was laid. The first play was written by a superior, 
thoughtful man with a vicious ear. I can mark his 
lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's 
soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, 
where instead of the metre of Shakespeare, whose 
secret is that the thought constructs the tune, so that 
reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm, 
— here the lines are constructed on a given tune and 
the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence." 

It is startling to find at the end of the essay an 
arraignment of the genius that saw the splendour of 
meaning in the visible world and was content to 
turn it into plays. Emerson also shares "the half- 
ness and imperfection of humanity," and the Puritan 
training that bred distaste for the theatre in even his 
beauty-loving mind led him to disdain forms of 
"public amusement" and to speak of the player 



6i 



Ralph Waldo Emerson, \ 

Prom the draithigty S. IV. Rowsc, by permission of .Messrs. Curtis 

.6* Ca,m iron and Messrs. $mall^ Maynard, &*■, Co. 

Copyright, i^oi. 



me 



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^. 





IRepreaentative flDen^ 193 

as a trifler. That Shakespeare was ''a jovial actor 
and manager " was a fact that he could not marry to 
the magical poetry of the dramas. This touch of 
ascetic narrowness is the " concealed thing" limiting 
his appreciation, and preventing him from seeing 
quite as much of merit as '' beseemed his work and 
spirit." 

But the essay as a whole is an extraordinary 
example of persuasive and potent criticism.. It drew 
from one of his most hostile English critics this spon- 
taneous outburst of admiration: 

''After all that has been written and said of the 
greatest of dramatists, there is a verdant freshness, a 
clear insight, a musical rhythm, a sympathy with the 
higher forms of poetry, in this lecture, which we can- 
not describe better than by saying as we do with 
unfeigned simplicity, that they have sufficed to ren- 
der our admiration of Shakespeare's genius even 
more reverential than heretofore." 

In the list of authors mentioned by Emerson 
which Dr. Holmes thought worth while to compile, 
Shakespeare's name leads the rest, having a hundred 
and twelve references to its credit. The next name 
on the list is that of Napoleon by the most surprising 
of juxtapositions. To read the essay at the begin- 
ning of which stands his name as ''man of the 
world," is readily to perceive the fascination he held 
for the antipodal Emerson. His power to perform, 
to attain definite ends, to realise positive rewards, 

appealed to the practical nature upon which the 

13 



194 IRalpb Malt)o Bmereon* 

dreamer in Emerson took secure stand. As a man 
of the people, a representative of the common sense 
and common talent of humanity raised to its highest 
efficiency, like Shakespeare a hero in demonstrating 
the greatness to which anyone of us might rise did 
we follow out our possibilities to their furthest con- 
clusion, as an efficient, prudent, vigorous intelli- 
gence, Napoleon called to Emerson's sympathy and 
admiration. 

''Napoleon had been the first man in the world 
had his ends been purely public," is the sentence 
pronounced upon his achievement and defect. And 
as with Shakespeare the central quality is made clear 
to us. Shakespeare shone with matchless charm 
in the broad altruism of his interests. Napoleon 
burns his egotism on the mind, and is seen to fail by 
it as Shakespeare failed by his nobler characteristic. 
The latter showed himself indifferent to personal 
ambition even in spiritual causes, and escapes Emer- 
son's sympathy at the point of declining to live 
personally on the plane of his vision. Napoleon had 
no vision beyond his personal welfare. The result 
was more grossly failure as the world is grosser than 
spirit, but less deeply felt by the critic discussing it. 
Emerson, in estimating Napoleon, was unhampered 
by the sense that he found most oppressive, the 
sense of possibilities unused. 'Mt was not Bona- 
parte's fault," is his conclusion. '' He did all that in 
him lay to live and thrive without moral principle. 
It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man 



IRepreeentative flDen* 195 

and of the world which baulked and ruined him ; 
and the result in a million experiments will be the 
same. Every experiment by multitudes or by indi- 
viduals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. 
The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the per- 
nicious Napoleon. As long as our civilisation is 
essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusive- 
ness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches 
will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our 
laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only 
that good profits which we can taste with all doors 
open, and which serves all men." 

It was characteristic of Emerson's occasional striv- 
ing after a verbal effect that he gave to his paper on 
Napoleon a title certain to mislead the reader accus- 
tomed to take words at their current value and 
meaning. The distinction to his own mind was ob- 
viously clear, however. The worldly man, the man 
with temporal aims and practical methods, the man 
who lived by sight and not by faith, was to him the 
**man of the world," and Napoleon was these. He 
was also '' the idol of common men " and the saviour 
politically of his class. Emerson's recognition of the 
fact that in spite of his later likings for the prizes 
of royalty he was thoroughly the representative of 
the industrious masses, of the laborious, ambitious, 
wealth-loving ''rabble of the Faubourgs," and that 
his gifts are like theirs in all but degree, gives to the 
essay its ringing quality of sound metal. His theory 
was just and he hammered it out with the pleasure 



196 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 

of handling firm stuff. His phrases are sympathetic 
with the quality of his subject: "Bonaparte knew 
better than society; and moreover, knew that he 
knew better" ; '' Bonaparte relied on his own sense 
and did not care a bean for other people's" ; ''Na- 
poleon understood his busmess. Here was a man 
who in each moment and emergency knew what to 
do next." In such plain straight speaking, Emerson 
seems to show his sympathy with the side of the 
Emperor that appealed to him always, apparently, 
with a sense of personal deficiency. ''He is never 
weak and literary," he says, using the word as else- 
where he uses it with a suggestion of contempt, 
"but acts with the solidity and the precision of 
natural agents." The praise well fits Emerson's own 
performance at a time and in a society which wel- 
comed his thoughts as their own, but which wasted 
the same thoughts by giving them a "weak and 
literary " form. However he may have fallen short 
of the robust vitality he admires in Napoleon and in 
Montaigne, that particular combination of adjectives 
could not have been applied at his worst moment. 
Next to Napoleon on the list made by Dr. Holmes 
is Plato, "the Philosopher." None of Emerson's 
writings has been so roughly handled as this lecture, 
unexampled in individuality and freedom from ac- 
cepted theory. The learned English critics found it 
also appallingly free from textual comment and from 
technical discussion of the Platonic system. A man 
of thought, certainly, but not of letters in the scho- 



IRepreeentatlve fIDem 197 

lastic sense of the word, pronouncing judgment 
upon Plato as a mere man, and insensitive to the 
minute significance of his philosophy was a phe- 
nomenon not to be taken seriously. It was not, 
however, as a scholar that Emerson approached 
Plato, but as an independent thinker with a ten- 
dency not unlike Plato's own toward blending the 
ideal and the actual. In reading the essay one asks 
what Carlyle can have meant by his complaint that 
the figure of Plato is vague and indefinite. Nothing 
could be less so. In place of the philosopher look- 
ing small and lost among his theories we see a man, 
a lecturer, polished, elegant, ironical, who has im- 
bibed from the East its idea of Unity, of one Deity 
in which all things are absorbed, and from the civil- 
isation of Europe the knowledge of variety and de- 
tail, a cool man, whose warrant and qualification to 
be the world's interpreter is a superb common sense. 
** He is a great average man; one who to the best 
thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his facul- 
ties, so that men see in him their own dreams and 
glimpses made available and made to pass for what 
they are." This is his representative quality and 
the one, the only one, Emerson cared to bring out. 
Whether he could have said more or not, whether 
he could have competed with dialecticians in the 
discussion of Plato's theories, is aside from the point. 
We know, of course, from our acquaintance with 
his mind that he could not, but what he did do was 
precisely what he wanted to do, he gave a picture 



19^ IRalpb TKIlal&o lemeraon. 

of the relation of a great mind to the universal mind 
of man. We know from his words the great ideas 
for which Plato stood and his distinction as a human 
being, not unimportant information to the small 
average man toward whom Emerson directed it. 
This passage shows how clearly he told his simple 
and impressive tale. 

'' In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive 
of the two elements (unity and variety). It is as easy 
to be great as to be small. The reason why we do 
not at once believe in admirable souls is because 
they are not in our experience. In actual life they 
are so rare as to be incredible; but primarily there 
is not only no assumption against them, but the 
strongest presumption in favour of their appearance. 
But whether voices were heard in the sky, or 
not; whether his mother or his father dreamed 
that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo; 
whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not ; 
— a man who could see two sides of a thing was 
born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; 
the upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; 
the union of impossibilities, which reappears in every 
object; its real and its ideal power, — was now also 
transferred entire to the consciousness of a man. 

''The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract 
truth he saved himself by propounding the most 
popular of all principles, the absolute good, which 
rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made 
transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by 



IReprceentative fIDcn* 199 

drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained 
by orators and polite conversers; from mares and 
puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks 
and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, 
butchers, and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in 
himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two 
poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His 
argument and his sentence are self-poised and 
spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become 
two hands to grasp and appropriate their own." 

Goethe, ''the Writer," and the last of the ''Repre- 
sentative Men," follows Plato in the list of those 
from whom Emerson quotes oftenest. His place at 
the end of the book suggests the esteem in which 
Emerson held him more truly than the number of 
quotations derived from him. He was the "law- 
giver of art," but "not an artist." His aim was 
culture, and "the idea of absolute, eternal truth, 
without reference to personal enlargement by it," in 
Emerson's eyes, is higher. He found Goethe inca- 
pable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment and 
therefore less noble than poorer writers, but he did 
justice to his wisdom, and found his representative 
quality in his ability to cope with "the rolling 
miscellany of facts and sciences " characteristic of the 
nineteenth century. He would have been impossible 
at any earlier time and stands easily for this. For 
sane and skilful generalisation this lecture like the 
others is admirable, and Emerson in the course 
of it gives this interesting statement of what he 



200 IRalpb Wlal^o Emerson* 

himself looks for in every writer; the gospel, that is, 
by which he is differentiated from his fellow men; 

''Talent alone cannot make a writer. There 
must be a man behind the book; a personality which 
by birth and quality is pledged to the doctrines there 
set forth, and which exists to see and state things so 
and not otherwise; holding things because they are 
things. If he cannot rightly express himself to-day, 
the same things subsist and will open themselves to- 
morrow. There lies the burden on his mind, — the 
burden of truth to be declared, — more or less under- 
stood; and it constitutes his business and calling in 
the world to see those facts through and to make 
them known. What signifies that he trips and stam- 
mers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that his 
methods or his tropes are inadequate ? That mes- 
sage will find method and imagery, articulation and 
melody. Though he were dumb it would speak. 
If not, — if there be no such God's world in the 
man, — what care we how adroit, how fluent, how 
brilliant he is ? " 

It was the message of Swedenborg that drew 
Emerson to him. His close study of natural phe- 
nomena and his exultant search for their source and 
cause inspired his sympathy, and his positive pro- 
nouncement on the side of pure goodness held his 
respect. For these reasons he devoted more than 
fifty pages to his qualities, setting him among his 
Representatives as the mystic. Quite as able as 
Plato to ''see two sides of a thing," however, he 



h 



IRepresentative flDen. 201 

balanced his merits with his defects. '' There is no 
such problem for criticism as his theological writings," 
he says, '' their merits are so commanding, yet such 
grave deductions must be made. Their immense 
and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie or the 
desert, and their incongruities are like the last 
deliration." The lecture on Swedenborg has been 
praised for its generosity and insight, but it lacks 
the joy of doing which is the happiest quality of 
most of Emerson's work. One reads with amused 
sympathy Dr. Edward Emerson's extract from the 
manuscript notes "\ hold him responsible for every 
yawn of mine," and in one of the brilliant quatrains 
published in the volume of poems this humorous 
revenge is taken. 

"A new commandment," said the smiling Muse, 
" I give my darling son. Thou shalt not preach "; 
Luther, Fox, Behmen, Swedenborg, grew pale. 
And, on the instant, rosier clouds upbore 
Hafiz and Shakespeare with their shining choirs. 

With Montaigne, the Sceptic, no such half- 
heartedness was shown. This warm and genial 
essayist, too coarse-grained for Carlyle, brought to 
Emerson the savour that he loved, the savour not of 
bookish retreats but of exhilarating outer world and 
healthy human nature enjoying it. He wrote in his 
journal, ''With all my heart I embrace the grand old 
sloven. He pricks and stings the sense of virtue in 
me, the wild gentile stock I mean, for he has no 



202 IRalpb IKIlalbo lEmereom 

Grace." The high praise found for this graceless 
Spur in the lecture is that he is not literary, ''i 
know not where the book that seems less written. 
It is the language of conversation transferred to a 
book. Cut these words and they would bleed." In 
Emerson's own essays how he strove for this result ! 
How he heaped illustration upon illustration from 
real life, from common dooryard life, to avoid 
''literary" explanation and description! It is the 
one point at which his critics may venture to feel 
a certain pity that he did not wholly fulfil his aim, 
so bravely conceived and so nearly attained. The 
effort toward muscularity of phrase is obvious yet 
the red blood does not always flow in those swift 
stout sentences of Emerson's prose. Like Steven- 
son he loved best what was just beyond his physical 
capacity. But — as with Stevenson — ^the passion for 
strength and health and sane thinking lifted his 
delicate genius on sweeping wings and carried it out 
of the atmosphere of the dusty closet to where it 
could at least look down with sympathy upon the 
struggling, brawling world with which it fain would 
have mingled. The language of Montaigne gave 
Emerson the same pleasure that he felt '' in listening 
to the necessary speech of men about their work, 
when any unusual circumstance gives momentary 
importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and 
teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower 
of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct them- 
selves and begin again at every half sentence, and, 



IRepre^entative flDen* 203 

moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and swerve 
from the matter to the expression." It was thus 
that one Cambridge man lashed himself to his 
hesitating syllables, and, in passing, it is well to 
recall that his sharp scorn of ill-health, also, that has 
seemed to many a hardness of heart, had its origin 
in the pluck that rode down physical weakness and 
fought the enemy of a frail constitution. Again 
Stevenson is suggested and that unconsciously cruel 
reference by Mr. Archer to the '' rosy-gilled, athletico 
aesthete" who was then declaring life happy from 
his sick room and finding that suffering could set a 
keen edge on what remained of the agreeable. 

The lecture on Montaigne seems full of him, so 
clearly is the man of Les Essais brought before us in 
his lustiest mood. Yet the greater part of the text 
has to do with scepticism, and it is curious to find 
that Emerson's idea of the sceptic is the breadth of 
a continent away from the ordinary acceptation of the 
word. Who would not write himself a sceptic if 
he could be convinced of this persuasive definition. 
''This then is the right ground of scepticism, — this 
of consideration, of self-containing; not at all of un- 
belief ; not at all of universal denying, nor of univer- 
sal doubting, — doubting even that he doubts; least 
of all of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is 
stable and good. These are no more his moods 
than those of religion and philosophy. He is the 
considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting 
stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man 



204 l?alpb Malbo lEmereon* 

has too many enemies than that he can afford to be 
his own foe; that we cannot give ourselves too many 
advantages in this unequal conflict, with powers so 
vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and this 
little conceited vulnerable popinjay that a man is, 
bobbing up and down into every danger on the 
other, it is a position taken up for better defence, 
as of more safety, and one that can be maintained; 
and it is one of more opportunity and range; as when 
we build a house, the rule is to set it not too high 
nor too low, under the wind but out of the dirt." 

From Emerson's report of Representative Men we 
learn much of himself, as Dr. Holmes has said, and 
as will doubtless be said by others so long as he is 
the subject of discussion. But the final lesson to be 
learned from the indisputable fact is that Emerson 
himself represented most of the essential qualities for 
which he sought human types, '' for the secrets of 
life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness." 





CHAPTER XI. 
POEMS. 

EMERSON delayed until 1847 the first edition 
of his poems, " uncertain always," he wrote 
to his brother, whether he had ''one true 
spark of that fire which burns in verse." It is not 
probable that to-day any critic of importance could 
be found to share his doubt. Whatever may be 
said of his prose there is one thing that must be said 
by all men of his poetry, that it is the expression of 
a poet. We may search for lines that do not scan, 
for endings that do not rhyme, for a metre that does 
not flow or march or sing, for dialect and collo- 
quialism, intricacy of diction, and grammatical in- 
version. We may find any or all of these and we 
shall not have disturbed by a hair's breadth our 
inner knowledge that we have been pecking and 
quibbling over the loveliest product of our national 
life. '' It is his greatest glory as a poet," Dr. Garnett 
wrote in his account of Emerson, "to have been 
the harbinger of distinctively American poetry to 

America." Possibly: but it is not our least glory as 

20 T 



2o6 IRalpb Malbo lEmereon* 

a nation that thus early in our literature one poet 
could make our wilderness blossom like the rose, 
and we may hope that somewhere the blessed seed 
lies waiting for his successor, not yet within the 
field of vision. 

We may well enough doubt, however, if Emer- 
son's poetry is ever to be popular poetry. The 
American people would have fulfilled a high ideal of 
democracy indeed were that to come about. Every 
poem is charged with thought and thinking is not 
popular. But every poem also is an example of 
Emerson's own theory that poetry is ''the perpetual 
endeavour to express the spirit of the thing," and it 
is the presence of the spirit, penetrating and inform- 
ing the thought, that makes Emerson's poetry perma- 
nently buoyant. The intellectual element strong as 
it is in it is borne upward in the flight of powerful 
sentiment. At one time his essays, so pellucid in their 
crystallised illustrations, were considered recondite 
and abstruse, and at the same time his poetry was 
said to be filled with unintelligible expressions. The 
day of ''popular science" has since arrived, and 
the popularisation of subjects formerly reserved for 
the learned is now so extended that one may go far 
to encounter readers in difficulty over Emerson's eru- 
dite allusions. One of his early public was heard 
not long ago to complain that the Threnody, beauti- 
ful though it was, contained passages of mysticism 
too complicated for his understanding. But one re- 
reading discovered the fact that while the noble and 



poem0* 207 

tender emotion retained its power to fill the eyes 
with tears, the darkness had become light and not 
a line of obscurity interrupted the mood of exalted 
resignation induced by the poet's acquiescence in 
the harmony of natural laws. 

It is then easily conceivable that to the larger 
number of educated men and women who read 
poetry, that of Emerson will be continually satisfy- 
ing. It is inspired by the conviction that in no 
other way can truth be spoken, a conviction always 
potent to move sincere minds. And it is raised in- 
finitely above prose by its delicate sensitiveness to 
suggestion in place of dogma. '* God himself does 
not speak prose, but communicates with us by hints, 
omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects 
lying all around us." Moreover it is essentially the 
voice of the age and country to which it belongs in 
its brevity and concentration. " Poetry teaches the 
enormous force of a few words, and in proportion 
to the inspiration checks loquacity." There indeed 
spoke the American, the man of all men to whom 
ennui is terrible, and diffuse sentiment ridiculous. 
If the soul is to be revealed there must be no long 
preamble to the overwhelming vision, and if we 
are not stirred beyond the possibility of expan- 
sive comment we have not seen. This terseness 
of description has, of course, its defect. It sel- 
dom conveys the sense of sweet leisure and the 
quiet influence of natural objects. In this stanza 
from Saadi its least fortunate aspect is shown, the 



2o8 IRalpb Mal&o jemersom 

abruptness of the images having no special fitness 
to the subject: 

Trees in groves, 
Kine in droves, 

In ocean sport the scaly herds. 
Wedge-like cleave the air the birds, 
To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks, 
Browse the mountain sheep in flocks. 
Men consort in camp and town. 
But the poet dwells alone. 

There is, too, a certain harshness of measure in 
many of his poems to which our generation re- 
sponds more readily than the previous one, no 
doubt, but which is too suggestive of conscious 
revolution against the insipid melody of much of the 
poetry of his own day. 

The kingly bard 

Must smite the chords rudely and hard. 

As with hammer or with mace, 

he announces in Merlin, and his intention to make 
''each word a poem," to fill each word with sig- 
nificance, has sometimes given his vocabulary an 
excess of substance which it takes all the free 
strong movement of his thought to carry. And it is 
true that he seldom used any but the simplest pat- 
tern in his constructions. Octosyllabic and deca- 
syllabic lines satisfied his idea of *'fit quantity of 
syllables " for the most part, and metrical intricacy 
had no charm for him. But to consider him there- 



Ipoeme* 209 

fore monotonous or unskilled in producing the 
effects of art is to judge him superficially. Many 
are his devices, when the ear is at the point of miss- 
ing the prick of novelty, to seize its attention and 
renev/ its interest. Note, for example, how delight- 
fully the slightly irregular jog-trot of the first stanza 
of the Ode to Beauty breaks in the second stanza 
into a pacing measure conveying the very essence 
of blithe emotion that maketh the heart glad without 
reason: 

I drank at thy fountain 
False waters of thirst; 
Thou intimate stranger, 
Thou latest and first! 
Thy dangerous glances 
Make women of men 
New-born, we are melting 
Into nature again. 

Lavish, lavish promiser, 
Nigh persuading gods to err! 
Guest of million painted forms 
Which in turn thy glory warms! 
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark. 
The acorn's cup, the rainbow's arc, 
The swinging spider's silver line 
The ruby of the drop of wine. 

But it would be a difficult matter to analyse 
Emerson's prosody. He has at least the happy 
skill to dispose the stress in his lines where it will 
emphasise the meaning and he does this without 
regard to arbitrary rules. The result is sometimes 
rocky syllables that forbid the climbing voice its 



2IO IRalpb Mal&o Cmereon. 

progress. More often it is a mastery of simple 
resources and intelligent combination. In Threnody 
the ear of the dullest reader must be caught by the 
recurrent contrast between the mood of sorrowful 
but calm reflection and that of a sudden yielding to 
the sharp pang of grief, each reflected in the metrical 
movement: 

The eager fate which carried thee 
Took the largest part of me: 
For this losing is true dying; 
This is lordly man's down-lying, 
This his slow but sure reclining, 
Star by star his world resigning. 

child of paradise, 

Boy who made dear his father's home, 

In whose deep eyes 

Men read the welfare of the times to come, 

1 am too much bereft. 

The world dishonoured thou hast left. 

O truth and nature's costly lie! 

O trusted broken prophecy! 

O richest fortune sourly crossed ! 

Born for the future, to the future lost. 

Certain mannerisms occur in his poems some- 
times as irritating defects, sometimes as quaint orna- 
ment suited to the individual style; and grammatical 
eccentricities are not lacking. 

In the lines so often quoted by dismayed critics, — 

The fiend that man harries 
Is love of the best; 

it is certainly open to the reader to place the accusa- 



Ipoeme. 211 

tive where he will, but these lines can hardly be called 
representative. Even where equally forced inversion 
occurs elsewhere the meaning is seldom obscured 
by it. Another peculiarity which gives an air of me- 
diasvalism disliked by exacting critics is the division 
into two syllables of the ending '' ion " and similar 
endings. But there is nothing really fixed or formal 
in the poems to give the dialectic mind its oppor- 
tunity. The description in Merlin of the true poet 
takes the precise outline of Emerson's muse : 

Great is the art, 

Great be the manners of the bard. 

He shall not his brain encumber 

With the coil of rhythm and number, 

But, leaving rule and pale forethought, 

He shall aye climb 

For his rhyme. 

** Pass in, pass in," the angels say, 

" In to the upper doors. 

Nor count compartments of the floors, 

But mount to paradise 

By the stairway of surprise." 

Surprise is a characteristic element in the larger num- 
ber of the poems. It piques the imagination and star- 
tles the indolent mind, suggesting old truths by fresh 
figures of speech and furnishing new points of view 
for poetic thinkers. This perhaps is to be expected 
in the work of a writer bent upon discarding outworn 
formulas and the conventions of prosy civilisations. 
What is remarkable is the extreme beauty of meta- 
phor, paradox, and symbol. It is comparatively 



212 IRalpb Malbo JEmereon. 

easy to be unexpected and nothing is cheaper than 
the effect when gained merely by the use of 
unconventional material in language or thought. 
But beauty, as Emerson knew well, demands an in- 
tegral idea beneath individual phrases, it demands 
the curve and balance of interior harmony, a structu- 
ral expression pervading and accounting for all seem- 
ing eccentricity. This first essential was never out 
of his mind. All his varied rhetoric is chosen to em- 
phasise the unity of man with God and with Nature. 
Against this noble background his most brilliant col- 
ours melt into harmony, his crudest forms appear 
majestic or at least organic. His unstained art, fresh 
and tonic with unflagging inspiration, has the merit 
he depicts in the May morning — 

None can tell how sweet, 

How virtuous, the morning air ; 

Every accent vibrates well ; 

Not alone the wood-bird's call, 

Or shouting boys that chase their ball, 

Pass the height of minstrel skill, 

But the ploughman's thoughtless cry. 

Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat, 

And the joiner's hammer-beat, 

Softened are above their will, 

Take tone from groves they wandered through, 

Or flutes which passing angels blew. 

All grating discords melt, 

No dissonant note is dealt, 

And though thy voice be shrill 

Like rasping file on steel, 

Such is the temper of the air, 

Echo waits with art and care, 

And will the faults of song repair. 



poeme* 213 

And even apart from this harmonising under- 
play of significance, even as dislocated fragments, 
many of his descriptive details are invested with 
penetrating interest. Salient characteristics of a 
scene or of a mental image flash across the under- 
standing like the swift bright wings of tropical birds. 
Nothing could be more running over 'with the tu- 
multuous gladness of an early springtime than this 
other stanza from May-Day — 

Where shall we keep the holiday, 

And duly greet the entering May ? 

Too strait and low our cottage doors, 

And all unmeet our carpet floors ; 

Nor spacious court, nor monarch's hall, 

Suffice to hold the festival. 

Up and away ! where haughty woods 

Front the liberated floods: 

We will climb the broad-backed hills, 

Hear the uproar of their joy ; 

We will mark the leaps and gleams 

Of the new-delivered streams, 

And the murmuring rivers of sap 

Mount in the pipes of the trees, 

Giddy with day to the topmost spire, 

Which for a spike of tender green 

Bartered its powdery cap ; 

And the colours of joy in the bird, 

And the love in its carol heard, 

Frog and lizard in holiday coats, 

And turtle brave in his golden spots ; 

While cheerful cries of crag and plain 

Reply to the thunder of river and main. 

What could better give the sense of wild, sensuous 
Nature making holiday than these '' cheerful cries of 



214 IRalpb Mal&o lEmereom 

crag and plain " ? Emerson's care to preserve the 
key-note of joy in being led him frequently to choose 
epithets with the special aim of suggesting mirth and 
glee, riotous rejoicing on the part of tree, hill, or 
planet. The ''sportive sun," the World-Soul with 
cheeks that * ' mantle with mirth, " and Nature ' ' game- 
some and good," ''merry and manifold," laugh 
through his poems; "The throbbing sea, the quak- 
ing earth, Yield sympathy and signs of mirth," the 
river is cheerful, the rills are gay, the mystic seasons 
dance. Love " laughs and on a lion rides," the Spring 
is merry, the rainbow smiles in showers, and the 
poet is " Blameless master of the games. King of 
sport that never shames." Seldom has any such 
body of verse been so gaily grave, so full at once of 
dignity and spontaneous joyousness, so eloquent of 
the spirit which he finds in his forests — 

. . . sober on a fund of joy 
The woods at heart are glad. 

It is, no doubt, as the outcome of this rich delight 
in the healthy aspects of nature, that he so often 
personifies natural objects and brings them into his 
poetry as living, warm companions, speaking his 
familiar language, but, instead of sharing his mood, 
imposing their own mood, a quite different matter 
from the "pathetic fallacy." Nature herself fre- 
quently appears as a beautiful caressing goddess, 
shedding smiles and friendliness as she walks the 
earth amonsr her children. What a free charm is in 



Ipoema^ 215 

this careless couplet of that chapter in the Poems 
headed by her name: 

But Nature whistled with all her winds, 
Did as she pleased and went her way ! 

And in this extraordinary little picture of man sur- 
veying the phenomena of experience and comforted 
by the lovely mother: 

Little man, least of all. 
Among the legs of his guardians tall. 
Walked about with puzzled look. 
Him by the hand dear Nature took, 
Dearest Nature strong and kind, 
Whispered, ** Darling, never mind! 
To-morrow they will wear another face, 
The founder thou, these are thy race! " 

Emerson's lighter poems not seldom reveal a 
childlike eagerness to learn the pleasant minor lessons 
of the outdoor world, and he is not his least poetic 
self when he is apostrophising the *' burly dozing 
humble bee " or the blackberries of his pasture, 
''Ethiops sweet," but it is when he is making 
pictures or thinking in music that he rises to heights 
of poetic style. Nothing that he wrote combines 
excellent form with high feeling and beautiful im- 
agery more satisfyingly than the austere and vivid 
lines on Days beginning: 

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes. 
And marching single in an endless file, 
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 



2i6 IRalpb IHIlalbo lEmereom 

This stanza of eleven lines is of an exquisite and 
noble loveliness v^hich has hardly been surpassed 
in English verse, never in the verse of Emerson's im- 
mediate contemporaries and successors. Its mate 
in pictorial words, delicate reserve, and imaginative 
power is The Rhodora in which the simplicity of 
Emerson's deepest thought smiles frankly in our 
faces from his blossoming New England solitudes. 
These two poems are types of his truest inspiration, 
embodying as they do his fervent sense of moral 
responsibility and his bright freedom from didactic 
moralising. It was while he strolled musing near 
the haunts of his fair Rhodora that he attained the 
curious spiritual passion or ecstasy to which at cer- 
tain moments Nature inspired him; the upspringing 
of these central fires of feeling which he thanks the 
God Pan for keeping in control: 

Haply else we could not live, 
Life would be too wild an ode. 

At these moments his pure-minded Bacchus pours 
*'the remembering wine" and fulfils his prayer 
that he 

Refresh the faded tints, 

Recut the aged prints, 

And write my old adventures with the pen 

Which on the first day drew 

Upon the tablets blue, 

The dancing Pleiads and eternal men. 

At these moments he is more the poet of energy, 
to adopt Matthew Arnold's phraseology, than Words- 



poeme* 217 

worth in his most soaring flight, than Arnold him- 
self at any instant. Mr. Brownell, Arnold's most 
discerning critic, has said of the latter that he is the 
poet par excellence of feeling that is legitimated by 
the tribunal of reason, and he finds his poetry ''ad- 
mirably representative of the combined thought and 
feeling of the era." '' But," he adds of his genius, 
'' it is a reflective and philosophic genius, and accord- 
ingly its sincerest poetical expression savours a little 
of statement rather than of song." It is the opposite 
of this quality in Emerson's most rapturous poems 
that presses home the conviction of his essentially 
poetic genius despite flaw and limitation. Rea- 
son is not to him a faculty by which imagination 
is restrained or crippled; it is the ether in which float 
all consoling and radiant thoughts, flowing into the 
human mind from the region of perfect bliss, ador- 
able as religion is adorable to such a worshipper as 
Vaughan. 

Mr. Brownell finds in Arnold's treatment of the 
theme of immortality that ''imaginative reason" 
which operates with an eloquence in which we can 
acquiesce because it makes no claim in the region 
of the unverifiable " which reason would not, in re- 
cognising its own limits, acquiesce in as properly 
within the jurisdiction of the imagination," and in 
reading his poetry, therefore, we have not to say to 
ourselves "But it is not true!" Emerson's treat- 
ment of the same theme is less cautious, but not, I 
think, less poetic. In this passage from the Threnody, 



2i8 IRalpb Mal5o JEmcxeon. 

although in some of its lines the rush of feeling 
is interrupted by complicated and infelicitous ex- 
pression, as nearly artificial as Emerson's always 
significant expression can become, its substance has 
pure poetic value and the emotion evoked by unal- 
terable law is of the highest intensity. If it is faith it 
is not blind faith. If it is reason it is not passionless. 
If it is not poetry it is nothing: 

Fair the soul's recess and shrine, 

Magic-built to last a season ; 

Masterpiece of love benign, 

Fairer that expansive reason 

Whose omen 't is, and sign. 

Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know 

What rainbows teach, and sunsets show ? 

Verdict which accumulates 

From lengthening scroll of human fates, 

Voice of earth to earth returned, 

Prayers of saints that inly burned, — 

Saying, what is excellent, 

As God lives, is permanent ; 

Hearts are dust. Hearts' loves remain ; 

Heart's love will meet thee again. 

Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye 

Up to his style and manners of the sky. 

Not of adamant and gold 

Built he heaven stark and cold; 

No, but a nest of bending reeds. 

Flowering grass and scented weeds; 

Or like a traveller's fleeing tent, 

Or bow above the tempest bent; 

Built of tears and sacred flames. 

And virtue reaching to its aims; 

Built of furtherance and pursuing, 

Not of spent deeds, but of doing. 

Silent rushes the swift Lord 



1 



poem0. 219 

Through ruined systems still restored, 
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless, 
Plants with worlds the wilderness; 
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow 
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow. 
House and tenant go to ground, 
Lost in God, in Godhead found. 

Arnold found Wordsworth's superiority in the 
fact that he dealt with more of life than Burns or 
Keats or Heine, and dealt with life as a whole more 
powerfully. If this is true of Wordsworth, as indis- 
putably it is, it is true of Emerson who equally with 
Wordsworth pursued one object, to ''attain inward 
freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment." Those 
who have found his poetry fragmentary can hardly 
have felt in it this moral unity. Already he has his 
expositors, from whom we learn that his Brahma for 
example, sums up the burden of the Bhagavad's 
philosophy, and that his reference to the wheel ''on 
which all beings ride " has its origin in the Rig Veda 
of the Hindoos, and that "the starred eternal worm " 
may be identified with the stupendous serpent-god 
of the Hindoos, and we are told how much of his 
philosophy he has drawn from the East and how 
much his poetry is steeped in Eastern feeling, but all 
this seems very far aside from his real poetic achieve- 
ment. His real poetic achievement lies outside of 
his borrowings from Eastern religions although this 
borrowing was characteristically the outcome of his 
truly poetic desire to unite the deep thought of the 
world. His real poetic achievement has its source 



220 IRalpb Malbo lEmcreon* 

in his power to penetrate the shows of things and 
reveal their essence. We cannot ignore his poetry 
because like that of Wordsworth it deals with reality, 
with the most real of all realities, the indestructible 
soul of man. If " how to live" is indeed, as Arnold 
has said, the important teaching of the greatest poets, 
and if no more than this is needed, we may class 
Emerson among them without fear, for if we do not 
learn from his poetry so far as may be learned from 
any exterior teaching, how to maintain within our- 
selves the strength of hope and serene intelligent 
trust and indomitable moral purpose, we are inca- 
pable of feeling the ''balm of thoughtful words." 




1 



CHAPTER XII. 
THE CLOSING YEARS. 

ALTHOUGH Emerson lived to be nearly 
seventy-nine years old, the greater part of 
the significant work of his life was accom- 
plished before he had completed his sixth decade. 
The rising tide of anti-slavery sentiment and the 
pressure of political and national questions some- 
what changed the current of his thought between 
1850 and 1865. Detached as he kept himself from 
partisan issues, he was not one who could study his 
Greek without allowing the news of the firing on Fort 
Sumter to disturb him. After the war had begun 
he found that powder '' smelt good " to him, but he 
kept constantly on the side of moderation in judg- 
ment, and realised, as few Northerners at that time 
seem to have done, the deplorable condition of the 
South. In one of his lectures on slavery in 1855 he 
urges the ending of the dangerous dispute on '' some 
ground of fair compensation on one side and of 
satisfaction on the other to the conscience of the 

Free States." 'Mt is really the great task fit for this 

221 



222 IRalpb Malbo jemereom 

country to accomplish," he says, ''to buy that pro- 
perty of the planters, as the British nation bought 
the West Indian slaves. I say buy, — never conced- 
ing the right of the planter to ow^n, but that we may 
acknowledge the calamity of his position, and bear a 
countryman's share in relieving him; and because it is 
the only practicable course and is innocent. Here is a 
right social or public function, which one man cannot 
do, which all men must do. T is said it will cost two 
thousand millions of dollars. Was there ever any 
contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this 
will be ? We will have a chimney-tax. We will 
give up our coaches, and wine, and watches. The 
churches will melt their plate. The Father of his 
Country shall wait, well pleased, a little longer for 
his monument; Franklin for his; the Pilgrim Fathers 
for theirs; and the patient Columbus for his. The 
mechanics will give; the needle-women will give; 
the children will have cent-societies. Every man in 
the land will give a week's work to dig away this ac- 
cursed mountain of sorrow once and for ever out of 
the world." Could this plan have been followed it is 
now obvious how economical it would have been, not 
merely in lives but in dollars, for a country left by 
the Civil War with a bonded debt of nearly three 
billions, to say nothing of the blighting legal-tender 
notes. Most of his suggestions, founded as they 
were upon permanent principles of wisdom, carried 
a certain practical weight with which the '' mystic " 
is seldom accredited, but which not infrequently is 



Zbc Cloeing l^eare. 223 

justly his due. In January, 1862, eight months 
before the Emancipation Proclamation, Emerson was 
clear that emancipation was the demand of civilisa- 
tion, and with much acuteness he compared the 
issue of slavery with other issues, some of which are 
still in dispute. 

''It is like free trade," he said, — ''certainly the 
interest of nations, but by no means the interest of 
certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds fat, and 
the eager interest of the few overpowers the apathe- 
tic general conviction of the many. Bank-notes rob 
the public, but are such a daily convenience that we 
silence our scruples and make believe they are gold. 
So imposts are the cheap and right taxation, but by 
the dislike of the people to pay out a direct tax, 
governments are forced to render life costly by mak- 
ing them pay twice as much, hidden in the price of 
tea and sugar." In the course of the same lecture, 
after defining the Emancipation policy in the form 
which he considered most desirable, he thus defines 
also his idea of government, in which his optimism 
shows its substantial quality: " I hope it is not a fatal 
objection to this policy that it is simple and beneficent 
thoroughly, which is the attribute of a moral action. 
An unprecedented material prosperity has not tended 
to make us stoics or Christians. But the laws by 
which the universe is organised reappear at every 
point, and will rule it. The end of all political 
struggle is to establish morality as the basis of 
all legislation. It is not free institutions, it is not a 



224 IRalpb XKHalbo lemereom 

republic, it is not a democracy that is the end, — no, 
but only the means. Morality is the object of govern- 
ment. We want a state of things in which crime 
shall not pay. This is the consolation on which we 
rest in the darkness of the future and the afflictions 
of to-day, that the government of the world is moral, 
and does for ever destroy what is not." Upon a 
Sunday shortly following the Emancipation Proclam- 
ation, he read an address, to the eloquence of which 
one of its auditors has borne ardent testimony: 

'' I have heard Sumner and Phillips and Lincoln 
and Gladstone," he says, '' and other famous orators, 
but never from other lips words so impressively 
spoken as concluding that address: 'Do not let the 
dying die. Hold them back to this world until you 
have charged their ear and heart with this message to 
other spiritual societies announcing the melioration 
of our planet!' "^ 

Not only in the stress of great national emergencies 
was Emerson a good citizen. He was scrupulous in 
his observance of a citizen's duties, and although he 
did not like workmg in associations, he was very 
willing to do what he judged his fair part of such 
public service. In 1863 he was appointed one of the 
visitors to the Military Academy at West Point, and 
Mr. Cabot quotes from a letter written by Mr. John 
Burroughs a delightful description of him, all eager- 
ness and attention where the rest of the Board 
looked dull or fatigued or peremptory, and wearing 
much the appearance of '' an eager, alert, inquisitive 

'J. W. Chadwick. 




Zhc ClOBirxQ lOeare. 225 

farmer." He could hardly be described as a ''club 
man " in the modern sense of the word, yet, accord- 
ing to Dr. Holmes, he was the nucleus of the Satur- 
day Club in Boston and was very regular in his 
attendance at its meetings, continuing to dine at its 
table until within a year or two of his death. In 
one chapter of the volume entitled Society and Soli- 
tude, which he published in 1870, he gives an admir- 
able picture of the uses and pleasures of a club from 
a point of view far from ''transcendental" in the 
familiar acceptance of that long-suffering word. The 
club is to bring people together who wish to ex- 
change thoughts and experiences, but it must be 
self-protecting, and obstacles arise at the outset. 
''There are people who cannot well be cultivated, 
whom you must keep down and quiet if you can. 
There are those who have the instinct of a bat to fly 
against any lighted candle and put it out, — marplots 
and contradictors. There are those who go only to 
talk, and those who go only to hear: both are bad. 
A right rule for a club would be, — Admit no man 
whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires 
people who are not surprised and shocked, who do 
and let do and let be, who sink trifles and know solid 
values, and who take a great deal for granted." 
There must not be too strong a tendency toward the 
superfine. There must be room for a large range of 
experience. " I knew a scholar, of some experience 
in camps, who said that he liked, in a barroom, to tell 
a few coon stories and put himself on a good footing 



IS 



226 IRalpb IKHalbo jBmcveon. 

with the company; then he could be as silent as he 
chose. A scholar does not wish always to be pump- 
ing his brains; he wants gossips. The blackcoats 
are good company only for blackcoats; but when the 
manufacturers, merchants, and shipmasters meet, see 
how much they have to say, and how long the con- 
versation lasts! They have come from many zones; 
they have traversed wide countries; they know each 
his own arts and the cunning artisans of his craft; 
they have seen the best and the worst of men. 
Their knowledge contradicts the popular opinion 
and your own on many points. Things which you 
fancy wrong they know to be right and profitable; 
things which you reckon superstitious they know to 
be true. They have found virtue in the strangest 
homes; and in the rich store of their adventures are 
instances which you have been seeking in vain for 
years and which they suddenly and unwittingly offer 
you." Here, again, is the instinctive repulsion to the 
'' scholar " and '' literary " man; and also the recep- 
tive attitude characteristic of Emerson in his inter- 
course with the active world as it was reproduced in 
the little society around him. '' My father delighted 
in town-meetings," his son records, ''and sat there 
humbly as an admiring learner, while the farmer, the 
shoemaker, and the squire made all that he delighted 
to read of Demosthenes, of Cato, of Burke, as true in 
Concord as in ancient cities." As an admiring learner 
he was prone to sit humbly among all his fellow-men 
and absorb lessons which he gave out again in- 



Zbc ClOBlrxQ ^cnvB. 227 

vested with the magic of his significant phrase. He 
became, however, increasingly indisposed to '' pump 
his brains " for new combinations of thought, and 
between i860 and 1870 produced little that was equal 
to his best, or that was altogether the fresh product 
of his mind, although he went on making up lectures 
from material already collected, and diligently deliv- 
ering them to meet the common necessities of his 
life, the war having sapped his resources. To this 
period, nevertheless, belong the beautiful May-Day, 
and Terminus, which he read, smiling, to his son, 
apparently in full vigour of health, but conscious of 
the inner monition of flagging faculties: 

It is time to be old, 
To take in sail: — 
The god of bounds, 
Who sets to seas a shore, 
Came to me in his fatal rounds, 
And said: ** No more!" 

Strange and sad it is to trace in the work of these 
later days the immitigable resolution of time that the 
gentle scholar should now '' contract his firmament." 
In 1870 he was asked, to his delight, to give a course 
of University lectures at Cambridge for the benefit 
of advanced students. He saw here the fitting time 
and place for a course of lectures on The Natural 
History of the Intellect, a subject that continually had 
called to him since his young-manhood. He would 
now, he thought, gather up the fragments of observa- 
tion which he had been for many years preserving 



2 28 IRalpb Malbo lemereom 

in notes, give them a consecutive form, and expand 
them to cover the range of his long meditation, but 
he was no longer mentally equal to the effort. After 
the first lecture he came home quoting, "1 have 
joined the dim choir of the bards who have been," 
and though he finished the course in good heart, it is 
impossible not to surmise that he was well aware of 
its failure to express his early purpose. His prophetic 
lines were promptly realised. He was now obliged 
to ''economise the failing river," and touchingly to 
follow out his counsel — 

A little while 

Still plan and smile, 

And, fault of novel germs, 

Mature the fallen fruit. 

Before he was sixty he had written, in a spirit of 
gay philosophy, upon Old Age, bent upon discover- 
ing its compensations, but nothing that he said then 
portrayed the extreme beauty of his quiet obedience 
to the natural law for which no personal deprivation 
could lessen his reverence. 

In 1 87 1 he took, with a party of friends, a trip to 
California, and out of the account of it, published 
by one of his companions, his sturdy unreadiness to 
benefit by the consideration of others shines con- 
spicuously. The year after his return a serious mis- 
fortune made it impossible for him not to accept the 
kindness that surrounded him, prepared, according to 
his own doctrine, to flow into any one of a hundred 
forms of manifestation. Early on a damp and windy 



Zbc CIoeinQ IPeare. 229 

summer morning his house caught fire, and he was 
obliged to work beyond his strength in the attempt 
to save his papers and other effects. The following 
day he was kept long in the blazing sun, and an ill- 
ness ensued which, though not severe, marked the 
beginning of the decline in memory and the faculty 
of continued attention described by Dr. Holmes in a 
letter to Lowell: '' Emerson is gently fading out like 
a photograph," he wrote; '* the outlines are all there, 
but the details are getting fainter." 

His friends in Concord had rallied to his assistance 
at the time of the fire, and, after it, had decided 
among themselves that the opportunity to be of fur- 
ther aid to him was not one to be passed by. A 
subscription was taken, and, first and last, more than 
fifteen thousand dollars were conveyed to him to be 
used in another European trip and for the rebuilding 
of his house. There could hardly have been a more 
severe test of his proud philosophy and loving tem- 
per than the acceptance of this spontaneous tribute 
provided. No reader of his chapter on Gifts, with 
his indomitable sincerity in mind, can fail to perceive 
the intense pathos of the occasion, or to realise in 
what courtesy of soul he finally bent to take the 
affectionate offering. *M am a lover of men," he 
wrote, ''but this recent and wonderful experience of 
their tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts 
day by day." 

His third and last transatlantic voyage, taken 
under these auspices, brought him, by way of Eng- 



230 IRalpb TKDialbo Emerson* 

land, France, and Italy, to Egypt, a land where there 
were no men to stimulate him, only colossal temples 
and strange trees to awaken his interest. In Eng- 
land Carlyle opened his arms to him in a brotherly 
embrace, and wondered at the ''striking and curious " 
spectacle of a man so confidently cheerful in these 
dark days of the modern world. In England also he 
saw, now for the first time, Gladstone, Browning, 
and Ruskin, the last notable to him as expressing a 
gloom deeper than Carlyle's, and without the sub- 
sequent laugh that cleared the air for the Scotch 
misanthropist. 

Upon his return to Concord he was met by crowds 
of his fellow-citizens, and passed through a flowery 
arch of triumph and between rows of school-chil- 
dren singing and cheering. By this joyous guard he 
was escorted to his new house, the counterpart of 
the old, in which every book, paper, and picture had 
been restored to its original position. Among all the 
eulogies, some of them sufficiently dithyrambic of a 
certainty, that marked Emerson's honour in his own 
country after his death, none were so eloquent as 
this labour of heart and hand spent freely for his 
happiness during his lifetime, and after his own day 
of industry was over. His comment, recorded by 
his son, is wholly characteristic, not only of himself 
but of the relation between him and his benefactors: 
'' My friends! " he said, pausing on his threshold and 
turning to those who had accompanied him thither, 
'' 1 know that this is not a tribute to an old man and 



t 



^be CIosirtQ ^cave. 231 

his daughter returned to their house, but to the 
common blood of us all — one family — in Concord! " 

During the remaining years of his life he got out 
his last volume of essays, Letters and Social Aims, 
with the assistance of his friend, James Elliot Cabot, 
and spent much time looking over and indexing his 
journals. He lectured little, finding increasing diffi- 
culty in remembering words, although his mind was 
entirely clear. He continued to attend the Lyceum 
and heard the speakers who filled his place there 
with unfailing pleasure. 

The failure of his mental machinery to respond to 
his will left his personal charm singularly undimmed. 
An artist, who came to his house to paint his portrait 
afterhismemory was nearly gone, said of him: ''I see 
Mr. Emerson every day, and every day he asks me 
afresh my name, — and I never saw a greater man." 
This dominating virtue of personality was long held 
to account for his pre-eminence among his contem- 
poraries, but time has proved it, so far as it existed 
apart from his thought and vision, merely the lovely 
light in which the enduring features of his genius 
were at once made beautiful and to a degree ob- 
scured. 

In the spring of 1882 he caught cold on one of his 
walks in the Concord neighbourhood, and after a few 
days of illness, the last one only spent in bed, he 
passed from earth, leaving the world different and 
better for his having been. 

To make clear to ourselves why his effect thus 



232 IRalpb Mal5o lemereom 

lives in us and helps us to diviner ends is an attempt 
as stimulating as it is difficult. Mr. Henry James 
has perhaps come as near as anyone to producing a 
phrase that epitomises his pervasive and evading 
genius: It is the genius ''for seeing character as 
a real and supreme thing," and again: ''With 
Emerson it is ever the special capacity for moral 
experience— always that and only that." Always 
that, but not only that. Combined with it is the 
capacity for esthetic experience. Mr. James, when 
he walked with him in his old age through the gal- 
leries of the Louvre and of the Vatican, was struck 
with the anomaly of a man so refined and intelligent 
being so little spoken to by works of art. But what 
is still more striking is that a man so conscious of 
practical ethics and the problems of moral experience 
should so insistently be spoken to by the interior 
vision of beauty, and should so completely decline to 
consider morality apart from it. He was conscious 
of beauty, not as vaguer moralists have felt it, a mere 
quality of the spiritual attitude, but as artists feel it, 
with all its exacting claims and immutable laws, 
the result in the final analysis toward which creation 
moves. *' Art has not yet come to its maturity," he 
says in an early essay, 'Mf it do not put itself abreast 
with the most potent influences of the world, if it 
is not practical and moral, if it do not stand in con- 
nection with the conscience, if it do not make the 
poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them 
with a voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work 



for Art than the arts. They are abortive births of 
an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to 
create ; but in its essence, immense and universal, it 
is impatient of working with lame or tied hands and 
of making cripples and monsters such as all pictures 
and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of 
man and nature is its end." 

Possibly this genius for seeing character as the 
real and supreme thing, and for seeing beauty as 
the inevitable result of right character, the soul at 
work with line and light, together with the faculty, 
supremely his, of applying general principles to the 
needs of the '' deep to-day " constitute the secret of 
his power over us. Had he been less firmly moral, 
had he loved beauty less passionately, had he spoken 
in language less pertinent to the present hour, he 
could hardly have touched so many of us. His voice 
is still heard in all our latest and most searching in- 
terrogation of the mysteries of being. We have not, 
after a hundred years, outlived him ; it is probable 
that we shall never outlive him, and for this reason, 
that he was a moral artist. His was the frame of 
mind in which an artist creates forms that endure, 
and his subject was the moral world. What more 
secure promise of permanence could be given ? 



o 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE FRENCH ESTIMATE. 

NE reflection occurs immediately," says 
Dr. Garnett, in 1888, discussing the per- 
petuity of Emerson's fame, '' he can never 
get beyond the English language. He has been 
excellently translated into German, and even into 
Italian: it is, perhaps, within the resources of French 
prose to provide a better translation still. But no 
merely French, or German, or Italian reader will 
have the least notion of the magic of his diction: 
hardly even will the foreigner well versed in English 
enjoy him to the full." 

Certainly no translation fully can render the 
peculiar charm of his highly individualised phrase, 
but it is an interesting fact that in France at least 
the appreciation of Emerson's work was prompt and 
enthusiastic. Fifteen years before Hermann Grimm 
wrote of him, '' He is as good as unknown among 
us in Germany," his thought, his style, and his 
temper were being analysed with considerable skill 

and with genuine sympathy for the French public. 

234 




.H 




CHAPTER XIII. 
THE FRESICH estimate. 

ONE reflection occurs immediately," says 
Dr. Garnett, in 1888, discussing the per- 
petuity of Emerson's fame, '' he can never 

get beyond the ^ft^^fe ^ms^' ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ 
excellently transla^dalBte^^tep^n- ^"d even mto 
iialia^^' '^ '*^ T^prhips, withir, ^'. ' :es of French 

pros ' ^""*' still. But n* 

^•> reader will 
;\c ui his diction 
ed in Em.' 

an render th 
iidividualised ph: 
bu. that in France at ' 

the api. V erson's work was prompt 

..r.4^. . ; > f: Fifteen years before Hermann Gr 
'* He is as good as unknown an 
us in " his thou^ "-* his style, and 

temper were bemg an: ' - wiin considerable 
and w ine sympathy for the French 

834 



Zbc fvcncb leetimate* 235 

In 1847, within a few years after the publication of 
the Essays and while the Poems were still damp 
from the press, a writer in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes, M. Emile Montegut, devoted thirty pages 
of that journal to the discussion of his quality, the 
distinction of which he proclaimed with no uncer- 
tainty of tone. His article opens with a designation 
now grown somewhat trite and wearying: '' Emer- 
son, like Montaigne, like Charron, like Shakespeare, 
is a sage." Following out his comparison, which 
doubtless seemed to his readers a bold one, M. 
Montegut describes the modern sage as lacking the 
systematic mind and rigorous logic of the ancients, 
declaring that in the sensuous life of the antique 
world it was true wisdom to concentrate the mind, 
as did Socrates and Seneca, upon a single point and 
to regulate the life by a single thought; but that 
amid the multiplied points of view and the innumer- 
able mental snares of modernity even the sage has 
become adroit rather than audacious, walking with 
hesitation, and constantly observing his environment. 
Such is the role played by Montaigne, Charron, and 
Shakespeare, — the role of great observer. Such is 
the role also that Emerson fills, continually observ- 
ing and continually seeking, but at one point sur- 
passing these richly endowed companions — at the 
point of character. By his character and by the 
audacity and concentration of his thought he is 
allied to the ancients, and thus misses no virtue of 
his class: '' All the qualities of the sage are in him," 



236 l?alpb IKHal&o jEmeraon* 

his critic finds, — ''originality, spontaneity, sagacious 
observation, delicate analysis, the critical faculty, the 
absence of dogmatism." The critical faculty, ''the 
principal attribute of the true sage," is eminent in 
him, and his writings contain a remarkable picture 
of the infirmities of the age, and a manly protest 
against them in the name of that individuality which 
is "stifled by the democratic system." Nor is his 
style found to be less notable than his penetration 
of mind. The charming art of the Essays, eflectually 
concealed from most of their contemporaneous com- 
mentators, is fully discussed. In using the essay 
form as a medium for his thought, Emerson, M. 
Montegut notes, has singularly modified it. To 
speak of the English essay from Addison to Hazlitt 
and Lamb is to suggest humour constantly upleap- 
ing, endless turns of phrase, unexpected thoughts, 
and, also, a certain lack of unity redeemed by rich- 
ness and infinite variety of detail. But in Emerson 
there is "an art of composition distinguishing him 
from other moralists. Each of his essays abounds 
in detail and observation, but, once arrived at the 
end of the chapter, it is easy to discover the har- 
mony under this apparent disorder." Truly a wise 
young judge, writing at the time when Carlyle 
was comparing Emerson's style with bags of duck- 
shot, and when critics less endowed were finding 
it obscure and confused and fitful. M. Montegut 
continues: "Chance thoughts attract him as they 
do Carlyle and Heine, but in his case the attrac- 



I 



Zbc ifrencb leetimate^ 237 

tion has in it no element of danger. The Amer- 
ican moralist can trust himself to the current of 
his reveries with the certainty of never losing sight 
either of the end to be attained or of the road by 
which to reach it. The tide of his imagination rises 
slowly, but it never deviates or drops. Ordinarily 
when 1 read the product of a poet, an orator, or a 
philosopher I can distinguish the moment when he is 
about to take his leap to become eloquent. There is 
an unexpected movement as if a stimulus were given 
to the imagination to enable it to spring, an effort 
often factitious, a beating of the wing. With 
Emerson there is nothing of the sort. His thought 
rises without exertion and without stir ; not precipi- 
tately but gradually; he arrives at eloquence without 
its having been perceived that he was approaching it. 
When he has reached a certain height he pauses in 
an intermediary region between earth and heaven, 
and his philosophy thus avoids both the vagaries of 
mysticism and the commonplaces of ordinary mor- 
alising. An enthusiasm which is not exaltation, a 
sort of rapture not that of desire, a contemplation 
not that of ecstasy, an imagination of the soul tinted 
with the purest reflections from nature, sustain him 
in his middle sphere between the visible world and 
the infinite." 

Here, also, is an appreciative passage upon the 
mingled sobriety and light-heartedness of Emerson's 
attitude toward nature, in which our own language 
is levied upon for the one right word: 



238 IRalpb Malbo fimeraom 

''There is light and colour in his verse, but it is 
the light only found in shadowy solitudes and thick 
woods, the light perfectly expressed in English by 
the phrases, sunny woods, sunny groves. This word, 
which is wanting in our language, seems to me 
admirably to render the sense of light penetrating 
foliage and shadow, appearing in its golden concen- 
tration a palpable and material substance, and quite 
lacking the pallor of the higher light. 'Sunny soli- 
tudes,' Emerson calls his beloved woods, and we 
fitly might call his poetic reveries and philosophic 
inspirations 'sunny soliloquies.' " 

The article is filled with similar delicate tributes 
to Emerson's gracious qualities as an artist, but the 
serious business of the criticism is to disclose his 
unique value as a writer upon questions of moral- 
ity. This made a peculiar and definite appeal to 
the thoughtful French mind of the late forties. His 
attitude toward the individual, M. Mont^gut main- 
tains, furnishes a salutary example to the student 
of European ideas at that moment. "From the 
moral point of view a society which should destroy 
genius and character would be an intolerable, im- 
pious, and iconoclastic society, for it would destroy 
the most beautiful work of art that exists, the 
individual character, the human soul, such as each 
of us may fashion by doing his duty. Of this 
Emerson is well aware, and therefore makes 
his protest on behalf of the individual. From the 
individual he exacts character and genius, from 



^be 3frencb leetimate. 239 

society he exacts that it shall walk not in one 
uniform path, but take its way through many; that 
it shall not close itself against all issues in order 
that no person shall pass beyond certain limits, but 
that it give each person freedom to choose his way." 
It was long after this that Emerson's lecture on 
Aristocracy was published for the first time, with 
its more complete definition of this point of view. 
Had M. Montegut been writing with it before 
him this passage would have presented itself for 
quotation: 

''The young adventurer finds that the relations 
of society, the position of classes, irk and sting him, 
and he lends himself to each malignant party that 
assails what is eminent. He will one day know that 
this is not removable, but a distinction in the nature 
of things; that neither the caucus, nor the news- 
paper, nor the Congress, nor the mob, nor the 
guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail to 
outlaw, cut out, burn, or destroy the offence of 
superiority in persons. The manners, the preten- 
sions, which annoy me so much are not superficial, 
but built on a real distinction in the nature of my com- 
panion. The superiority in him is inferiority in me, 
and if this particular companion were wiped by a 
sponge out of nature, my inferiority would still be 
made evident to me by other persons everywhere 
and every day." 

But higher even than his teachings to the frantic 
apostles of democracy, higher than any immediate 



240 IRalpb TKHal&o lemereon* 

influence that he could exert upon the turbulent 
social and political tendencies of the time, M. 
Montegut esteems Emerson's independence of all 
temporal questions and mutual considerations. With 
a fine exercise of his clear Gallic intelligence he 
grasps the dominating virtue of Emerson's mind and 
its importance in an age distinguished by shortness 
of sight and superficiality of interests. The ability 
to fix the attention upon eternal truth, undistracted 
by accidents of time and place, is the supreme 
achievement of either the ancient or the modern 
sage. This ability in Emerson is truly described as 
crowning all the evidences of his genius. '' Poster- 
ity," his courageous critic concludes, '' will not forget 
that he has given to our century what Montaigne 
gave to his, a new ideal of wisdom." He was quite 
right: posterity has not forgotten; nor has this still 
bolder prophecy failed of fulfilment: 

''When the day comes that in the United States 
the superiority of Emerson is recognised without 
opposition, when his doctrines have fervent follow- 
ers, when the majority of minds pronounce in his 
favour, there will have been a great change in the 
manners, the habits, the tendencies of America." 

This preoccupation with Emerson on the part of 
a critic typically French in the disinterestedness of 
his mental processes and the orderliness and definite- 
ness of his method, is interesting both as showing 
Emerson's appeal to the French intelligence through 
his freedom from exuberance, his impartial vision, 



J 



Zbc 3frencb leetimatc. 241 

and his instinctive mental and moral balance; and as 
showing the positive value of criticism based on the 
application of a definite aesthetic and moral standard 
to literary phenomena. M. Montegut emphasised 
in his analysis of Emerson's newly discovered genius 
precisely the qualities that attract the critical atten- 
tion toward him to-day, and whether or not his 
estimate of them is sound it is both responsible and 
discriminating. 

When in 1850 he contributed to the Revue an- 
other article on Emerson, inspired by the publication 
of Representative Men, his mind was occupied with 
the part played by great men in bringing about the 
Revolution; and in comparing Emerson's book with 
Carlyle's Hero IVorship he gave the preference to 
the latter because it places the greatness of energetic 
men, living and struggling among realities, higher 
than the greatness of the passive thinkers. It was 
more difficult for him sympathetically to appreciate 
the spirit which could, as he said, express ideas in 
1848 precisely as they would have been expressed in 
1846; and while he could admire the imperturbable 
confidence that was neither intimidated nor shaken 
by revolutions and reactions; that sacrificed nothing 
to the spirit of the moment; that discussed Plato and 
Swedenborg when the whole world had ears only 
for M. Prudhon and M. Louis Blanc; that praised the 
scepticism of Montaigne as if the century were not 
one that boasted of its absolute philosophies, he 

could not entirely acquiesce in what he calls 
16 



242 IRalpb Malbo lemeraon* 

Emerson's theory of '' easy greatness." He does not 
recognise in it what Carlyle calls the hero, but sees 
in it the great man only in an antique sense, in the 
modern sense the man of genius. ''The great man 
as Emerson depicts him is the pagan, par excel- 
lence, the man whose grace comes by nature." But 
Christianity has changed the ideal of heroism. " In 
modern times man is no longer great by condition 
and by nature, but by task achieved, by incessant 
labour, by duty performed. How will it serve him 
to display his great soul? It is no longer any- 
thing but a symbol; as Emerson says, it is only the 
shadow of the ideal; but in ancient times it was a 
reality. To-day, thanks to Christianity, the humblest 
and poorest of men has an ideal more elevated than 
the soul of Epaminondas, Plato, or Homer." If this 
attitude is not so much at variance with that of Emer- 
son as the writer narrowing his attention to the 
one book supposes, the next point of disagreement 
is more serious in its conventional acceptance of 
Emerson's indifference to the problem of evil. M. 
Montegut's tone, like that of Mr. Morley many years 
later, is one not of antagonism but of pained sincer- 
ity. Neither critic can recognise his modern inter- 
rogation of the universe in travail and suffering in 
Emerson's vision of a universe from which pain and 
evil are excluded by the reason that every man has 
lived scrupulously according to the inner law. 

''This theory of easy greatness," M. Montegut 
argues, " is almost inadmissible, since Christianity 



^be fvcncl) lEetimate* 243 

has recognised the existence of suffering and of sacri- 
fice. Greatness is no longer the goal of man; it is 
no longer the end, it is but a means; the end lies 
beyond greatness itself. In ancient times individual 
greatness was the end, man attained nothing beyond 
supreme beauty; but in modern times beauty also is 
no more than the instrument of truth. Calm, that 
supreme attribute of truth, is no more; Christianity 
has stirred the soul to trouble by the example of the 
Saviour; he has given himself in trial and suffering, 
and has won for us an ideal of perfection which 
allows no repose. If calm and greatness sufficed, 
Christianity would have no excuse for being, — Sto- 
icism would be enough. Thus the great enemy of 
Christianity, Spinoza, has attempted to revive and 
exalt all the calm and serene attributes of antique 
virtue. He who has replaced in virtue the hero and 
great man of ancient times is not the modern hero 
but the saint. . . . It is only the saint who pos- 
sesses the gift of power to live with the divine and 
the intellectual without the temptation to dominate 
these celestial forces, who can let himself be inspired 
by them with the simplicity of the child." 

In spite, however, of the fact that Emerson does 
not lay sufficient stress on the beauty of overcoming 
to please his critic to whom the fine passage on Fate 
and Free-will in the Conduct of Life has not yet 
spoken, it is granted that his theory of great men 
is infinitely to be preferred to the then popular theory 
of the power of circumstances to create greatness; 



244 IRalpb Mal&o j£mcvBon. 

and the doctrine so pungently expressed in the poem 
on The Celestial Love 

He that feeds men serveth few; 
He serves all who dares be true, 

is analysed and reapplied with lively appreciation of 
its worth. 

From the time of this article to the end of the 
century Emerson was the subject of but two more 
critical papers in the Revue, one of them by M. 
Montegut on English Traits, the other a superficial 
and unenlightening discussion of the Poems by Th. 
Bentzon. In 1902 came another long and thor- 
ough investigation of the substance and form of 
Emerson's work, — this time by M. Roz, a much less 
sympathetic interpreter than M. Montegut, but no 
less earnest or intelligent. Finding that Emerson's 
thought belongs essentially to his country and time, 
and that it loses much of its prestige in crossing 
the Atlantic, he freely accords him the distinction 
of writing from a point of view in astonishing con- 
formity with the needs and aspirations of that time 
and country. *' Other countries and other epochs 
have given greater thinkers; none, to use his own 
phrase, a more representative one." 

In order to comprehend the usefulness of such 
idealism as Emerson taught, one must understand, 
M. Roz assures his countrymen, the crying need 
of the young democracy which, to his mind, was 
fast crumbling into a dust of independent units, and 



^be ifrencb leetimate. 245 

if the quietism at which Emerson's individualism 
strangely arrives is at first sight disconcerting, it 
must be borne in mind that ''the American world in 
which the practical sense is always awake, has only 
too marked a tendency to attach itself to works. 
There is no need to teach it the value of action, of 
effort, of enterprise. What is important, on the con- 
trary, is to lead it to recognise the worth of love, of 
the interior sentiments." What is most difficult for 
M. Roz to justify is Emerson's optimism. This he 
accepts as the ineluctable consequence of his system 
and the fundamental tendency of his mind, but he 
feels that his hope is akin to indifference; his insist- 
ence upon the obligation of each individual to col- 
laborate with the good intentions of the universe is 
offset by his dislike of admitting the difficulties, 
struggles, and disabilities of human nature in its 
weakness. This, in essence, is the complaint of M. 
Montegut, and of Mr. Morley as well, and arises, cer- 
tainly, through no impatient or ineffectual examina- 
tion of Emerson's writings. But is it a reasonable 
complaint ? If it is, we have to admit that Emerson, 
despite his extraordinary endowment, is not a writer 
to move hearts; that he is the mere illustrator of 
ideas and not a student and teacher of life. Un- 
questionably it is true that in his writings Emerson 
declined to dwell upon the presence of evil in the 
world, and it is true that, as M. Roz with some dis- 
approval points out, he did counsel the suppression 
of all reference to personal ailments either of body or 



246 IRalpb TKHalbo jemereon* 

soul. There seems to be but one explanation at 
once consistent with these facts and with our con- 
ception of Emerson as the friend of man, the lover 
of his kind. His French critics and some of his 
English critics have commented upon his singular 
blending of individuality with universal aims and in- 
terests. But it is upon the union of these apparently 
opposing elements in humanity that he bases his 
hope for a regenerated world. Before all of us he 
holds the ideal life, the rounded perfection of beauty 
in thought, conduct, and aspiration. To each of us 
he leaves the solution of our individual problems, our 
grapple with the special evil that threatens or defect 
that limits. That is our part, quite sacredly our own, 
and not to be pried into or meddled with by even 
the moralist. His part is to display the goal, to lure 
with visions of the exquisite outcome of duty per- 
formed, never more radiantly shown as the rainbow 
of the soul, to stimulate with accounts of the worth 
of goodness and truth, the ravishing charm of virtue. 
Both the evil of intention and the evil of accident are 
indeed left out of his scheme, not, perhaps, because 
he is indifferent to the suffering they cause, but be- 
cause his way of inspiring man's soul with the hope 
that quickens is to show the kingdom of righteousness 
as though it were the pearl of great price, to obtain 
which a man might well give all that he had of other 
treasure. This is the ''indirect service" which is 
all, he says, that any man has it in his power to ren- 
der another; this is the life-giving light of influence 



Zbc fvcncb leetimate* 247 

that pours down upon the heart and causes it to 
blossom in good deeds. If self-sacrifice is not 
preached it is included in self-development such as 
he urges upon the individual. As M. Montegut in 
one of his papers has explained, Emerson does not 
set up great men, as Carlyle does, in the position 
of natural guides of the people, antique demi-gods, 
or apostles, but as terrestrial types of the divine and 
holy, at once mirrors of nature and temples of God. 
Toward common men he held the same attitude. 
In fact, '' There are no common men," he says. " All 
men are at last of a size, and true art is only possible 
on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis 
somewhere." Each man has in him the divinity 
according to which he must live and by which he 
must learn his method, whether it turn out to be 
self-sacrifice or the enjoyment of different oppor- 
tunity. To the deeply religious mind there is no 
shock in this assumption. Is it not from the highest 
Christian source that we have learned to call our- 
selves '' gods " without blaspheming ? 

Possibly the inclination to regard Emerson's op- 
timism as of the heartless type is due to a perfectly 
simple and, on the whole, natural error in defining 
his attitude toward life, an error avoidable only by 
attempting to discern as far as possible the mood in 
which he advocated receptivity and serenity. He 
is taxed with the defects of an exclusive doctrine, 
when, apparently, his controlling intention was to 
teach a morality the most inclusive to be conceived. 



248 IRalpb TKIlal&o lemereon* 

M. Roz, for example, finds his serenity more or less 
disdainful and distant, and affirms that in his counsel 
to us to be as a shadow crossed by a ray of divine 
light he takes too little cognisance of the human 
obstacles retarding and interrupting the ray's transit; 
of our need for all strength and all help in over- 
coming them. To begin with, the passage from 
which this specific illustration of Emerson's theory 
is taken is marked by one of his rare modifications: 
" Great genial power, one would almost say, consists 
in not being original at all; in being altogether recep- 
tive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the 
spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the 
mind." But, of course, there are passages in plenty 
to convey the general idea as M. Roz has grasped it. 
Other passages, however, to be read in connection 
with these theories, in which Emerson speaks of con- 
duct, show his belief in self-discipline and moral 
action with entire recognition of all the demons that 
fight against morality and faith. Man contends with 
the strength of his moral nature against the acci- 
dents and foes that would destroy his belief in ulti- 
mate good. '' When his mind is illuminated, when 
his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the 
sublime order, and does with knowledge what the 
stones do by structure." In other words, he clears 
away the obstacles blocking his heart against the 
divine ray. His acquiescence in the order of the uni- 
verse at the moment when it is most cruel and crush- 
ing presupposes the elevation of his mind and soul 



Zhc frencb iBetimate* 249 

to the perception of love and goodness. '' One way 
is right to go: the hero sees it and moves on that aim, 
and has the world under him for root and support/' 
This surely is not only the clear-seeing but the right- 
acting hero. ''I know not whether there be, as 
is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere a 
permanent westerly current, which carries with it all 
atoms which rise to that height, but 1 see that when 
souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they 
accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. 
A breath of will blows eternally through the universe 
of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary. 
It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, 
and it is the wind which blows the worlds into 
order and orbit." The entire chapter on Fate in 
which Emerson once for all sums up the horrors 
of our existence, breathes the spirit of Christianity, 
the spirit that inspires the saint and the sage to suf- 
fer for the universal benefit. '' 1 come," said Christ, 
'' not to destroy the law but to fulfil it. " From centu- 
ries before his day what Emerson calls ''the Beautiful 
Necessity " has been regarded by the sceptical as the 
tyrant of our life. Emerson's scepticism is of a 
different order. Sceptical of essential evil, he can 
write in a spirit as purely religious as that of the 
devout martyrs: *Mf we thought men were free in 
the sense that in a single exception one fantastical 
will could prevail over the law of things, it were all 
one as if a child's hand could pull down the sun. 
If in the least particular, one could derange the order 



250 IRalpb Malbo JBmcxeon. 

of natjre, — who would accept the gift of life?" 
Obviously this is neither disdain nor egoism. If it is 
a doctrine too passive for the modern world it awaits 
the growth of the modern world to its altitude of 
reasonable faith. 

For Emerson's appreciation of the scientific spirit 
and joyous acceptance of scientific discovery M. Roz 
has naturally the most cordial admiration, and his 
estimate of Emerson's art, particularly as shown in 
his prose, echoes M. Montegut's favourable verdict. 
** He is a poet by virtue of his tone; a creative power 
dwells in his words. . . . Like Socrates, whom 
he loved, he deems that truth belongs to all, is at the 
doorway of all; that the task of the philosopher is to 
make it admired and beloved. Thus, perchance, his 
surest originality lies in the fact that he warms all 
truth at the fires of moral and poetic imagination. 
For all truth interests him. This is plainly to be 
seen in the variety of his work. He borrows from 
theology and science, aesthetics and morals, history 
and legend. He looks in every direction, and all the 
objects beheld by him illuminate one another in his 
eyes, reveal to him their hidden relations, their 
secret harmonies. Hence the charm, slightly whim- 
sical at times but nearly always compelling, of his 
style." 

In these criticisms Emerson is at least made real 
to the French public. Through them he is seen to 
be a dignified and unique figure in literature, and his 
message is coherently rendered. Curiously, also, it 



1 



t^ 



"^UCill > 



<rift of life?" 

^ ism. If it is 

^ world it awaits 

its altitude of 



s ap[ ;ie scientific spirit 

acceptance ot scientific discovery M. Roz 

the most cordial admiration, and his 

^ Emerson's art, particularly as shown in 

echoes M. Mont^gut's favourable verdict. 

'* He is a poet by virtue of his tone; a creative power 

dwells in his word:,. . . . Like Socrates, whom 

hf. loved, he deems that truth belongs to all, is at the 

uuui way of all; ^^j^^^^^J^^gl^the philosopher is to 

ma^ it admired^and beloved.. thiiJi, Derdiance, his 

By Daniel Chester French. By permission of Trie Xlenlury Co. ' 

su in the fact that he warms all 

at the 

to br 

of h 

>, hist 
.1, and all 
another in 
elations. ' 
cnarm, slightly \ 
ompelling, 

1 is at least mac^ 
public. Through them he i^ 
d unique fissure in literature 
^f^ntly renc Curiousb 



Zl)c ]frencb leetimate* 251 

is a French writer — a Belgian writing in French — 
who has most adequately commented upon the ele- 
ment in his work most valuable to the common 
mind, and least often dwelt upon by judicial critics, 
—his power, that is, of casting glory over the 
common day, of seeing grandeur in our dust. 
M. Maurice Maeterlinck has chosen, characteristi- 
cally, to embody his criticism of Emerson in the 
indirect manner of the impressionist; and as no 
synopsis or report of his essay could in the least 
represent its spirit it is translated in its complete 
form as it appeared in Le Tresor des Humbles : 

*' ' One sole thing matters,' says Novalis, — 'the 
quest, that is, of our transcendental self.' This self 
we perceive at times in God's word, in that of poets 
and sages, in the deeps of certain joys and certain 
sorrows, in slumber, love, and illness, at sudden mo- 
ments when from afar it signals to us and points to 
our relation with the universe. 

''Certain wise men have pursued no other quest 
than this and have written those books in which 
only the extraordinary reigns. 'What is there of 
value in books,' our author says, 'save the trans- 
scendental and the rare ? ' These men are like 
painters striving in the dark to gain a likeness. 
Some have traced abstract images of great size but 
nearly indistinguishable. Others have succeeded in 
fixing an attitude or habitual gesture of the higher 
life. Many have imagined strange beings. These 
pictures are not numerous. They are never alike. 



252 IRalpb TlWalbo lEmevBon. 

Some are very beautiful, and those who have not 
looked upon them are, during their whole lifetime, 
like men who have never been out of doors at noon- 
day. There are those drawn in line purer than that 
of heaven ; and these figures appear to us so far dis- 
tant that we are ignorant whether they live or were 
copied from ourselves. These are the work of the 
pure mystics, and in them man does not yet recog- 
nise himself. Others, called poets, have told us in- 
directly of these things. A third class of thinkers, 
raising by one degree the old myth of the Centaurs, 
has given a more accessible image of this occult 
identity by mingling the outlines of our apparent self 
with those of our higher self. The countenance of 
our soul divine smiles now and again over the shoul- 
der of the human soul, her sister, bending to lowly 
tasks of thought ; and that smile, revealing glimpses 
of all that exists beyond the limits of thought, is all 
that matters in the works of man. 

'' They are not many who have shown us that man 
is greater and more profound than man, and who 
have succeeded in fixing thus some of the eternal 
suggestions encountered by us at every moment of 
life, in a gesture, a sign, a look, a word, in silence, 
and in the events that hedge us about. The science 
of human grandeur is the strangest of sciences. 
None among men is ignorant of it; but hardly one 
knows that he possesses it. The child who meets 
me will not be able to tell its mother that which it 
has seen; and yet from the moment its eye has rested 



JLhc ifrencb lEetimate* 253 

on me it knows all that I am, all that I have been 
and shall be, as well as my brother, and three times 
better than myself. It knows me instantly in the 
past and future, in the present world and in other 
worlds ; and its eyes in turn reveal to me the part 1 
play in the universe and in eternity. Infallible souls 
are judged by one another; and from the first in- 
stant its eyes have taken in mine, my face, my atti- 
tude, and the infinite by which these are surrounded 
and of which they are interpreters, the child knows 
upon what to rely; and even though he does not yet 
distinguish the crown of an emperor from the wallet 
of a beggar, he has for one moment known me as 
accurately as God. 

'' In truth we already behave as the gods, and our 
entire life passes amid infinite certainties and infalli- 
bilities. But we are blind men playing with precious 
stones along the road ; and this man knocking at my 
door dispenses, at the moment of greeting, spiritual 
treasures as marvellous as any gifts a prince whom I 
might have snatched from death could bestow upon 
me. I open to him, and in an instant he sees at his 
feet, as from the summit of a tower, all that takes 
place between two souls. The peasant woman of 
whom 1 ask my way I judge as deeply as though 1 
asked my mother's life of her ; and my own soul has 
spoken to me as intimately as that of my betrothed. 
She rises swiftly to the highest mysteries before re- 
plying, then tells me tranquilly, knowing what I am 
at a glance, that I must take the path to the left for 



254 TRalpb IKHalbo JEmcvBon. 

the village. If I pass an hour in the midst of a 
crowd, 1 have judged the living and the dead a thou- 
sand times silently, and v/ith but a moment's thought, 
and which of these judgments shall be changed at the 
last day ? There are in this room five or six beings 
who speak of rain and of fine weather ; but above 
this paltry conversation their souls hold intercourse 
which no human wisdom could approach without 
danger ; and though they speak through look and 
gesture, and face, and presence, what they have said 
they will never know. They must await, however, 
the end of their indiscernible dialogue, and that is 
why they have I know not what of mysterious joy 
in their languor without comprehending that which 
in them hearkens to all the laws of life, and death, 
and love which flow like never-failing rivers around 
their abode. 

' * Thus is it everywhere and always. We live only 
by our transcendental being whose acts and thoughts 
each moment pierce the envelope surrounding us. 

'M go to-day to see a friend whom 1 have never 
seen ; but 1 know his work and I know that his soul 
is extraordinary and that he has spent his life in 
manifesting it as exactly as possible in accord with 
the duty of the higher minds. 1 am anxious and the 
hour is solemn. He enters ; and all the explanations 
he has given us in the course of many years fall in 
dust at the opening of the door to admit him. He is 
not that which he believes himself to be. He is other 
than his thought. Once again we prove that the 



Zbc fvcncb leetimate. 255 

emissaries of the mind are ever faithless. He has 
spoken deep things about his soul ; but in that little 
instant between the glance that pauses and the glance 
withdrawn, I have learned all that he will never be 
able to say and all that he will never be able to make 
alive in his mind. He belongs to me henceforth ir- 
revocably. Formerly we were united by a thought. 
To-day something many thousand times more mys- 
terious than thought delivers us into one another's 
hands. For years we have looked forward to this 
moment ; and now we feel that all is useless, and in 
fear of silence we who were prepared to show each 
other vast and secret treasures talk together of the 
striking hour or the setting sun, that our souls may 
have time to wonder at each other, and drop away 
into another silence, not to be troubled by the mur- 
mur of lips and thoughts. 

''At bottom, we live only from soul to soul and are 
gods without knowing it. If to-night, unable to en- 
dure my solitude, 1 go down among men, they will 
tell me that the storm has beaten their pears to the 
ground, or that the last frosts have closed the harbour, 
is it for this that I have come ? And yet I shall soon 
depart, my soul as satisfied and strengthened and 
filled with new treasure as though 1 had passed these 
hours with Plato, Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius. 
What their lips speak is unheard beside what their 
presence proclaims, and it is impossible for man not 
to be great and admirable. What thought thinks is of 
no importance by the side of the truth that we are, 



256 IRalpb Malbo lemereon* 

affirmed in silence ; and if, after fifty years of soli- 
tude, Epictetus, Goethe, and St. Paul were to touch 
upon my island they could tell me only what the 
light spray of their bark must tell me at the same 
time and perhaps more directly. In truth, that 
which in man is strangest is his gravity and hidden 
sagacity. The most frivolous among us never really 
laughs and in spite of his efforts never succeeds in 
losing a moment, for the human soul is watchful and 
does nothing uselessly. Ernst ist das Leben (life is 
earnest), and in the depths of our being our soul has 
not yet smiled. On the other side of our involun- 
tary agitations we lead a wonderful existence, mo- 
tionless and very pure and very sure, at which our 
out-stretched hands, our opening eyes, our meeting 
glances, continually hint. 

''All our organs are mystical accomplices of a 
higher being, and it is never a man but a soul that 
we have known. I have never seen the poor man 
begging alms on my doorstep without perceiving one 
thing else, the identical destinies in our eyes greeting 
one another, and at the moment he stretches forth 
his hand the little house-door opens for an instant 
upon the sea. ' In my dealing with my child,' says 
Emerson, ' my Latin and Greek, my accomplish- 
ments and my money stead me nothing ; but as much 
soul as 1 have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will 
against mine, and leaves me, if 1 please, the degrada- 
tion of beating him by my superiority of strength. 

*' ' But if I renounce my will and act for the soul, 



% 



Zbc 3ftencb lEBtimate* 257 

setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his 
young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves 
with me.' 

*' But if it is true that the last among us cannot 
make the smallest gesture without taking account 
of the soul and the spiritual kingdoms over which 
it reigns, it is also true that the wisest hardly ever 
thinks of the infinite which acts through the eyelid 
opening, the head inclining, the hand closing. We 
live so far from ourselves that we are ignorant of 
nearly all that takes place on the horizon of our being. 
We wander at random in the valley, unsuspecting 
that all our movements appear again with their true 
significance upon the summit of the mountain; and 
we need that some one come to us from time to time 
to say: ' Lift up your eyes, behold what you are, be- 
hold what you are doing; it is not here that we live; 
it is yonder on high.' This glance exchanged in the 
shadow; these words, meaningless in the valley, — 
behold the meaning they take on beyond those 
snowy peaks, and how our hands, that we believe 
so weak and small, touch God at every moment, 
without knowing it. 

'There are those who have come to lay hand upon 
our shoulder and point out to us what is taking place 
' upon the glaciers of mystery. They are not many: 
there are three or four of them in this century. 
There have been five or six in others; and all that 
they are able to tell us is as nothing beside what ex- 
ists and is known by our soul. But what matter ? 

>7 



258 IRalpb THIlalbo JEmereon. 

Are we not like one who in early childhood has lost 
his sight? He has seen the measureless spectacle 
of creation. He has seen the sun, the sea, and the 
forest. Now these marvels for ever belong to him; 
and should you speak of them what could you say 
to him, and what would your poor words be beside 
the forest-glade, the tempest, and the daybreak which 
still live in the depths of mind and flesh ? He will, 
however, listen to you with ardent and amazed de- 
light, and though he knows all, and though your 
words represent that which he knows more imper- 
fectly than a glass of water represents a great river, 
the little feeble phrases falling from the lips of man 
will for an instant illuminate the ocean, the day, and 
the sombre foliage sleeping amid shadows under his 
lifeless lids. 

' ' The facets of this ' transcendental self, ' of which 
Novalis speaks, are no doubt innumerable, and no 
two of the mystic moralists have succeeded in study- 
ing the same one. Swedenborg, Pascal, Novalis, 
Hello, and others examine our relations endlessly, 
abstrusely, subtly, and from afar off. 

'' They lead us over mountains where not all the 
summits seem either habitable or natural, and where 
we often breathe with pain. Goethe accompanies 
our soul upon the shores of the sea of serenity. 
Marcus Aurelius establishes it upon the hillside of a 
humanity weary in its perfection, and under the too 
heavy foliage of hopeless resignation. Carlyle, the 
spiritual brother of Emerson, who in this century has 



^be ifrencb lEetimate* 259 

told us of the opposite end of the valley, shows sin- 
gle heroic moments of our being in lightning flashes 
against a background of cloud and storm, of an Un- 
known never other than monstrous. He leads us like 
a flock dispersed by tempest toward strange sulphur- 
ous pastures. He thrusts us into the deepest of the 
shadows which he has joyously discovered, lighted 
only by the intermittent fierce star of heroes, and 
there abandons us with wicked laughter to the vast 
reprisals of mystery. 

'' But here at the same moment is Emerson, the 
good shepherd of the morning, in the pale verdant 
meadows of a new optimism, natural and credible. 
He does not insist that we skirt the abyss. He does 
not take us out of the humble familiar inclosure, for 
the glacier, the sea, the eternal snows, the palace, 
the stable, the funeral pall of the pauper, the bed of 
sickness, are all under the same heavens, purified by 
the same ^tars, and subject to the same infinite forces. 

''To many he has come at the moment of need, at 
the instant when they were in mortal want of new 
interpretations. The periods of heroism have faded 
out of sight, those of abnegation have not yet come; 
nothing is left us but the daily life, still we cannot 
live without greatness. He has given to this life, 
divested of its traditional horizon, an almost satisfac- 
tory meaning, and possibly he has shown us that 
it is strange and deep and broad enough to be its 
own excuse. He knows no more of it than others, 
but he affirms with greater courage, and he has 



26o IRalpb HClalbo lemeraon* 

confidence in the mystery. You must live, all you 
who pass through the days and years without ac- 
tivity, without thought, without light, because your 
life, in spite of everything, is incomprehensible and 
divine. You must live, because no one has the right 
to subtract from the spiritual events of common- 
place weeks. You must live, because there are no 
hours without their intimate miracles and ineffable 
meanings. You must live, because there is not an 
act, not a word, not a movement which escapes the 
inexplicable claims of a world ' where there are many 
things to do, and few things to know.' 

'' Life is neither great nor small, and the deed of 
Regulus or Leonidas has no importance when 1 com- 
pare it with one moment of my soul's secret being. 
That soul might or might not be able to do what 
they have done; these things do not touch it; and the 
soul of Regulus, when he was returning from Car- 
thage, was probably as distraught and as indifferent 
as that of the workman on his way to his factory. 
It is too removed from all our deeds; it is too re- 
moved from all our thoughts. It lives alone within 
us a life of which it does not speak; and from the 
heights where it reigns the variety in our life is not 
distinguishable. We walk weighed down by our 
soul, and there is no proportion between it and our- 
selves. Possibly it never considers what we are 
doing, and this fact may be read in our faces. If one 
would interrogate a mind from another world as to 
the typical expression of the human countenance, it 






ir^- 



^1 






200 



.aii^u v^^iUk) Ctiicr0cn* 



must live, all you 

-rnr<: without ac- 

, oecause your 

rehensible and 

one has the right 

the spiritual events of common- 

i must live, because there are no 

it their intimate miracles and ineffable 

You must live, because there is not an 

...., not a word, not a movement which escapes the 

inexplicable claims of a world ' where there are mnny 

things to do, and few things to know/ 

'' Life is neither great nor small, and the deed of 
Regulus or lRQJl^0^3m^mmSi^^^^ when I com- 
pare it with omfnmmm}%pkpWi»PuVs secret being, 
soul mifi^ht or do what 

I the 

•rent 

ay . 

,o, .L io too re- 
es alone within 
; and from th^" 
ariety in our life is 
>K weighed down by oi 
is no proportion between it and 
ly it never considers what wt 
.5 fact may be read in our faces. 1: 
^ ^^^ate a mind from another world . 

^jjression of the human counten^^' 



^be Jrencb lEatimate* 261 

would no doubt reply, after having seen mankind in 
joy, in grief, and in anxiety: ' They have the air of 
thinking of something else/ Be great, be wise and 
eloquent; the soul of the poor man stretching out his 
hand for alms at the corner of the bridge will not be 
envious, but yours perhaps will envy him his silence. 
Heroes have need of the common man's appro- 
bation, but the common man does not ask the ap- 
probation of heroes, and follows his way without 
anxiety, as one who has all his treasures secure. 
'When Socrates speaks,' says Emerson, 'Lysis 
and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they 
do not speak. They also are good. He likewise 
defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Be- 
cause a true and natural man contains and is the 
same truth which an eloquent man articulates; but 
in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, 
it seems something the less to reside, and he turns 
to these, silent, beautiful, with the more inclination 
and respect.' 

'' Man is avid for explanations. He demands that 
his life be shown him. He rejoices to find some- 
where the exact interpretation of a little gesture he 
has been using for the past twenty-five years. Here 
there is no little gesture, but the universal attitude 
of the common soul. You will not find here the 
eternal quality of a Marcus Aurelius. But Marcus 
Aurelius is thought incarnate. Moreover, which 
of us leads the life of a Marcus Aurelius ? One is 
man here and nothing more. He is not arbitrarily 



262 IRalpb Wnlbo lEmereom 

magnified; only he is brought nearer to us than usual. 
It is John who cuts down the trees; it is Peter building 
his house; it is you speaking to me of the harvest; it 
is I giving you my hand; but we are taken at our 
point of contact with the gods, and are astonished 
at what we do. We did not know that all the pow- 
ers of the soul are present, we did not know that 
all the laws of the universe attend upon us; and we 
turn round and stare at each other speechless, like 
people who have beheld a miracle. 

''Emerson came to affirm simply this equal and 
secret grandeur of our life. He has enveloped us 
with silence and wonder. He has placed a ray of 
light under the foot of the artisan coming out of his 
shop. He has shown us all the forces of heaven and 
earth, busy holding up the threshold on which two 
neighbours speak of the falling rain and the rising 
wind. And above the two wayfarers, pausing for 
their chat, he shows us the face of one god smiling 
upon another. He is nearer than any one else to our 
habitual life. He is the most watchful to warn, the 
most assiduous, the most honest, the most scrupu- 
lous, perhaps the most human. He is the sage of 
the common day, and common days make up the 
sum of our existence. More than one year rolls by 
without passions, without virtues, without miracles. 
Let us learn to revere the petty hours of life. If 1 
have acted this morning in the spirit of Marcus 
Aurelius, do not emphasise my deeds, for I myself 
am aware that something has been achieved. But 



JSflSK!^h'^ im^Si i - - C W>? SSiAi: ^-■'^>3r-'^ar.^v■^»«- -. 




Emerson's Grave at Concord. 

From a photograph bj> A. Hosmer. 



Zbe ftcncb JBetimatc. 263 

if I think I have lost my day in poor enterprises, and 
if you can prove that nevertheless I have lived as 
deeply as a hero, and that my soul has not lost its 
rights, you will have done more than if you had 
persuaded me to save my enemy upon this day, for 
you have augmented in me the sum, the grandeur, 
and the desire of life, and to-morrow, perchance, 
I shall be able to live with self-respect." 

Certainly the French critics cannot be said to 
have neglected Emerson's claim to detailed con- 
sideration; and that they so early perceived and so 
long discussed his service to humanity may reasona- 
bly be considered to prove not only their perspicac- 
ity but the far-reaching character of that service. 
It has been said, by a Frenchman, that we know 
French literature through the blusterers. We can- 
not retaliate. The French have taken pains to know 
us by the best we have produced. In their estimates 
of Emerson they have stood as a generous illustra- 
tion of his words: ''The genius of life is friendly 
to the noble, and in the dark brings them friends 
from far." 




APPENDIX. 

THE following tables of contents for the sixteen 
numbers of The Dial are based on those 
given in Mr. George Willis Cooke's article 
on the origin and character of the magazine in the 
Journal of Speculative Philosophy for 1886. Those 
articles attributed to Emerson by Mr. Cooke, and 
omitted in Mr. Cabot's list of his contributions to The 
Dial, are marked with a star. The ones considered 
by Mr. Cabot doubtful are marked with a dagger; 
and the ones ascribed to Emerson by Mr. Cabot and 
omitted by Mr. Cooke are printed in italics. 

THE DIAL. 

A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. 

Volume I. 

Boston: 

Weeks, Jordan and Company 

121 Washington Street. 

London: 
Wiley and Putnam, 67 Paternoster Row. 

MDCCCXLL 

Volume L Number i. 

CONTENTS. 

The Editors to the Reader . . i— R. W. Emerson. 
A Short Essay on Critics . . 5— Margaret Fuller. 

265 



266 



appenbiy* 



To the Aurora Borealis 

Notes from the Journal of a Scholar 

The Religion of Beauty 

Brownson's Writing 

The Last Farewell 

Ernest the Seeker (Chapter First) 

The Divine Presence in Nature 

and in the Soul 
Sympathy .... 
Lines .... 

Allston Exhibition 

Song. S. G. Ward. — To 

Orphic Sayings . 

Stanzas .... 

Channing's Translation of Jouffroy 

Aulus Persius Flaccus . 

The Shield .... 

The Problem 

Come Morir ? . . . 

1 Slept and Dreamed that Life was 

Beauty 
The Concerts of the Past Winter 
A Dialogue .... 
Richter — In the Morning Breeze 

Dante 

Sketches .... 



1 1 — C. P. Cranch. 
13 — C. C. Emerson. 
17 — Dwight. 
22 — Geo. Ripley. 
47 — E. B. Emerson. 
48 — W. H. Channing. 

58 — Theo. Parker. 

71 — Thoreau. 

72 — Ellen T. Emerson. 

73 — Margaret Fuller. 

84 — R. W. Emerson. 

85— A. B. Alcott. 

98 — C. P. Cranch. 

99— W. D. Wilson. 
117 — Thoreau. 
121 — S. G. Ward. 
122 — R. W. Emerson. 
123 — S. G. Ward. 

123 — Ellen Hooper. 

124 — Dwight. 

134 — Margaret Fuller. 

135 — Margaret Fuller. 

136 — Sarah Freeman Clarke. 

136 — Margaret Fuller. 



Volume I. Number 2. 



Thoughts on Modern Literature . 

Silence . . . . . 

First Crossing the Alleghanies 

A Sign From the West 

Angelica Sleeps .... 

Nature and Art; or, The Three 
Landscapes . . . . 

The Art of Life : The Scholar's Call- 
ing 

Letters to a Theological Student . 

"The Poor Rich Man" 



137 — R. W. Emerson. 
158 — R. W. Emerson, 
159 — ^J. F. Clarke. 
161 — C. P. Cranch. 
172 

173^. F. Clarke. 

175 — F. H. Hedge. 
183 — Geo. Ripley. 
187 — Ellen Hooper. 



appenMy. 



267 



Musings of a Recluse . 

The Wood Fire . 

The Day Breaks . 

The Poet 

Life .... 

Evening 

A Lesson for the Day . 

Wayfarers . 

From Goethe 

Psean . . . . 

Lyric .... 

Truth against the World 

Waves 

New Poetry 

Art and Artist 

Ernest the Seeker (Chapter Sec 
ond) 

Woodnotes: Number I. 

Life and Death 

Record of the Months . 

The Works of William E. Chan 

ning, D. D. Four Volumes 

Third Edition. Glasgow 

1840 

Two Sermons on the Kind Treat- 
ment and on the Emancipation 
of Slaves. Preached at Mo- 
bile. With a Prefatory State- 
ment. By George F. Simmons 
A Letter to those who Think. 

By Edward Palmer 
Professor Walker's Vindication 

of Philosophy 
The Athenaeum Exhibition of 
Painting and Sculpture . 

Select List of Recent Publications . 
Dana's Two Years before the 

Mast 

Fourier's Social Destiny of Man . 
Ranke's Popes .... 



188— C. P. Cranch. 
193 — Ellen Hooper. 
193 — C. S. Tappan. 
194 — Ellen Hooper. 
195 — C. S. Tappan. 
195 — C. S. Tappan. 
196 — Th. Parker. 
216 — Ellen Hooper. 
216 

217 — C. S. Tappan. 
217 — C. S. Tappan. 
218 — Th. Parker. 
219 — C. S. Tappan. 
220 — R. W. Emerson. 
2-^2 — C. S. Tappan. 

233 — W. H. Channing. 
242 — R. W. Emerson. 
245 — C. S. Tappan. 
246 



246 — R. W. Emerson.* 



248 — R. W. Emerson.* 



251 




256 




260- 
264 


-Margaret Fuller. 




Emerson. ? 




Emerson. • 
Parker. 



268 



appen&li. 



Harwood's Materialism in Re- 
ligion 

Cousin's Plato . . . . 



Emerson. 



Volume I. Number 3. 



Man in the Ages . 

Afternoon .... 

Questionings 

Endymion .... 

Hymn and Prayer 

Klopstock and Meta 

The True in Dreams 

The Magnolia of Lake Pontchar 
train .... 

Love and Insight . 

Sunset .... 

Give us an Interpreter . 

Ideals of Every-Day Life. No. I 

To Nydia .... 

The Violet .... 

Stanzas .... 

German Literature 

The Snow-Storm 

Menzel's View of Goethe 

Suum Cuique 

The Sphinx 

Orphic Sayings 

Woman 

Sonnet 

Thoughts on Art 

Glimmerings 

Letters from Italy on the Repre- 
sentatives of Italy 

To the Ideal 

Record of the Months 
Michael Angelo Considered as a 
Philosophic Poet, with Trans- 
lations. By John Edward 
Taylor 



273 — Th. T. Stone. 
289 — C. S. Tappan. 
290 — F. H. Hedge. 
291 — C. P. Cranch. 
292 — J. F. Clarke. 
293 — Margaret Fuller. 
298 — C. P. Cranch. 

299 — xMargaret Fuller. 

305 — C. S. Tappan. 

30"^ — C. S. Tappan. 

306 — C. S. Tappan. 

307 — ^J. S. Dwight. 

312 — J. F. Clarke. 

314 — Ellen Tucker Emerson. 

314 — H. D. Thoreau. 

315 — Th. Parker. 

339 — R. W. Emerson. 

340 — Margaret Fuller. 

347 — R. W. Emerson. 

348 — R. W. Emerson. 

351— A. B. Alcott. 

362 — Sophia Ripley. 

366— J. R- Lowell. 

367 — R. W. Emerson. 

379 — C. P. Cranch. 

386— S. G. Ward. 
400 — Ellen Hooper. 
401 



401 — R. W. Emerson, f 



appenMy* 



269 



Select List of Recent Publications 402 
Robbins's Worship of the Soul . 402- 



■R. W. Emerson, t 



Volume I. Number 4. 



The Unitarian Movement in New 

England 
Dream 
Ideals of Every-Day Life. No. II 

Home . 
Listen to the Wind 
The Wind Again 
Leila .... 
The Genuine Portrait . 
The Real and the Ideal 
Hermitage . 
The Angel and the Artist 
Shelley 
A Dialogue . 
Thoughts on Labour 
The Out-Bid 

Theme for a World Drama 
Man, the Reformer 
Music of the Winter 
Farewell 



409 — W. D. Wilson. 
443— J. F. Clarke. 

446 — J. S. Dwight. 
461 — Ellen Hooper. 
461 — Ellen Hooper. 
462 — Margaret Fuller. 
468— J- F- Clarke. 
468— J. F. Clarke. 
469 — W. E. Channing. 
469— Caroline S. Tappan. 
470 — John M. Mackie. 
494 — Margaret Fuller. 
497 — Theodore Parker. 
519 — Ellen Hooper. 
520 — W. E. Channing. 
523 — R. W. Emerson. 
539 — ^- F- Tuckerman. 
544 — Ellen Hooper. 



Volume II. Number i 



Goethe .... 

Two Hymns 

Night and Day 

The Blind Seer 

Wheat Seed and Bolted Flour 

Song 

Need of a Diver . 

Clouds .... 

" The Future is better than the Past 

August Shower . 

The Pharisees 

Protean Wishes . 



I- 
42- 

45- 

47- 

48- 

52 
53- 

55- 
57- 
58- 

59- 

77- 



-Margaret Fuller. 
-E. T. Clapp. 
-W. H. Channing. 
-C. P. Cranch. 
-W. H. Channing. 

-Margaret Fuller. 
-E. T. Clapp. 
-E. T. Clapp. 
-E. T. Clapp. 
-Theodore Parker. 
-Theodore Parker. 



270 



appenML 



Painting and Sculpture 
Sic Vita .... 
Bettina .... 

Prophecy — Transcendentalism — 
Progress 

Sonnet to . 

Letter 

Lines 

Sonnet .... 

Notices of Recent Publications 

Jones Very's Essays and Poems 

Carlyle's On Heroes 

Lowell's A Year's Life 

Translations of Goethe 

H. Martineau's Hour and Man 

Tennyson, Stirling, and Festus 

The Plain Speaker . 

Lines 

To Contributors . 



78 — Sophia Ripley. 
81— H. D. Thoreau. 
82 — Caroline S. Tappan. 

83 — ^J. A. Saxton. 
121 — W. E. Channing. 
122 — Sophia Ripley. 
129 — Caroline S. Tappan. 
129 — ^J. R. Lowell. 
130 

130 — R. W. Emerson. 
131 — Margaret Fuller. 

U3 

J 34 

134 — Margaret Fuller. 

135 — Margaret Fuller. 

135 — Margaret Fuller. 

136 — Sara A. Chase. 

136 — Margaret Fuller. 



Volume II. Number 2. 



Cupid's Conflict, 

By Dr. Henry More, 1647 

Lives of the Great Composers : 
Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Bach, 
Beethoven 

Light and Shade . 

Friendship . 

Painting and Sculpture 

Fate .... 

Woodnotes : Number 11. 

A Glimpse of Christ's Idea of 
Society 

Poems on Life 

Windmill 

Festus 

Walter Savage Landor 

Inworld 



137 — Selected by 

A.B. Alcott. 



148 — Margaret Fuller. 
203 — Caroline S. Tappan. 
204 — H. D. Thoreau. 
205 — R. W. Emerson. 
20s — R. W. Emerson. 
207 — R. W. Emerson. 

214 — Elizabeth P. Peabody. 

228 

230 — W. E. Channing. 

231 — Margaret Fuller. 

262 — R. W. Emerson. 

271 — C. P. Cranch. 



appenbiy* 

Volume II. Number 3. 



271 



First Principles 

(Poetical Motto) . 

Yuca Filamentosa 

In world 

Outworld 

Primitive Christianity 

Bettine Brentano and her friend 

Gunderode . 
Sonnet 
Sonnet 

Sonnet. To Irene on her Birthday 
The Hour of Reckoning 
Sonnet. To Mary on her Birthday 
De Profundis Clamavi 
Music. To Martha 
Plan of the West Roxbury Com- 
munity 
The Park . . . 
Forbearance 
Grace .... 
The Senses and the Soul 
Epilogue to the Tragedy of Essex 
From the German of Goethe 
Editor's Table 

Transcendentalism . 

(Calvinist's Letter) . 

(Friend's Letter) 
Notices of Recent Publications 

Plan of Salvation 

Motherwell's Poems 

Goethe's Egmont 

Monaldi .... 

Wilde's Conjectures and Re 
searches 

Boston Academy of Music 

Theory of Teaching . 

The Ideal Man . 



273 — W. B. Greene. 
286 — W. E. Channing. 
286 — Margaret Fuller. 
288— C. P. Cranch. 
290 — C. P. Cranch. 
292 — Th. Parker. 

313 — Margaret Fuller. 
357— J. R. Lowell. 
351—}' R- Lowell. 
358— J. R. Lowell. 
358 — Ellen Hooper. 
359 — B. F. Presbury. 

359 

360 — B. F. Presbury. 

361 — E. P. Peabody. 
373 — R. W. Emerson. 
373 — R. W. Emerson. 
373 — R. W. Emerson. 
374 — R. W. Emerson. 

380— M. Fuller. 

382 

382 — R. W. Emerson. 

382 — Th. T. Stone. 

3S3 

38s— J. F. Clarke. 

393 

394 — Margaret Fuller. 

395 — Margaret Fuller. 

399 — Margaret Fuller. 

407 

408 

408 — R. W. Emerson, f 



2 72 appenMy* 


Volume II. Number 4. 


Note to the Editor 


409 — A. B. Alcott. 


Days from a Diary 


409 — A. B. Alcott. 


Marie van Oosterwich. Translated 




from the French . 


437 — Margaret Fuller. 


Silence and Speech 


483 — C. P. Cranch. 


Thoughts on Theology 


485 — Theodore Parker. 


Herzliebste 


528 — Ch. A. Dana. 


Record of the Months . 


529 


Whewell's Inductive Sciences . 


529 — Th. Parker. 


Whewell's Morals 


530 — Th. Parker. 


Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History 


531 — Th. Parker. 


Harwood's German Anti-Super- 




naturalism .... 


535 — Th. Parker. 


Republications 


539 — Th. Parker. 


Milman's History of Christianity 


540 — Th. Parker. 


Gibbon's Rome, edited by Mil- 




man ..... 


542 — Th. Parker. 


Volume III. Number i. 


Lectures on the Times. Intro- 




ductory .... 


I — R. W. Emerson. 


Natural History of Massachusetts 


19 — H. D. Thoreau. 


Gifts 


40 — W. E. Channing. 


The Lover's Song 


41 — W. E. Channing. 


Sea-Song 


42 — W. E. Channing. 


The Earth-Spirit .... 


42 — W. E. Channing. 


Prayer 


42 — W. E. Channing. 


After- Life 


43 — W. E. Channing. 


Autumn Leaves .... 


44 — W. E. Channing. 


Entertainments of the Past Winter 


46 — Margaret Fuller. 


Tact 


72 — R. W .Emerson. 


Holidays 


73 — R. W. Emerson. 


The Amulet ..... 


73 — R. W. Emerson. 


The Castle by the Sea. From 




Uhland 


74 — Tr. by F. H. Hedge 


Eternity 


7^ — Ch. A. Dana. 


Vespers 


76 



I 



appenbix* 



273 



Prayers . . , . 

(Metrical Prayer) 

(Prayer) .... 
To Shakespeare . 
Veeshnoo Sarma . 
(Lines) .... 

Fourierism and the Socialists 
The Evening Choir 
The World .... 
Chardon Street and Bible Conven- 
tions .... 
The Two Dolons . 
Agriculture of Massachusetts 
Outward Bound . 
Record of the Months . 

Borrow's Zincali 

Lockhart's Spanish Ballads 

Colton's Tecumseh . 

Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales 

Hawthorne's Stories for Child- 
ren . . . 

Cambridge Miscellany 

Short Notices . 
Intelligence .... 

Wilkes's Exploring Expedition 

Association of State Geologists 

Harvard University . 

(Wordsworth's New Poems) 

(Tennyson and Henry Taylor) 

Schelling in Berlin . 

New Jerusalem Church 



Romaic and Rhine Ballads . 

The Black Knight 

Lectures on the Times: The Con 

servative 
The Inward Morning . 
Free Love .... 



77 — R. W. Emerson. 
79 — H. D. Thoreau. 
80 — Junius Alcott. 
81 — W. E. Channing. 
82 — R. W. Emerson. 

86— R. W. Emerson. 
97 — Jones Very. 
99 — Jones Very. 

100 — R. W. Emerson. 
112 — Ch. N. Newcomb. 
123 — R. W. Emerson. 
126— B. P. Hunt. 
127 

127 — R. W. Emerson? 
128 — R. W. Emerson? 
129 — R. W. Emerson? 
130 



. 131 








. 131 








. 131 








. 132 








. 132- 


-R. 


W. 


Emerson. 


. 133- 


-R. 


W. 


Emerson. 


• 133- 


-R. 


W. 


Emerson. 


• 135- 


-R. 


W. 


Emerson. 


. 135- 


-R. 


W. 


Emerson. 


. 136- 


-R. 


w. 


Emerson. 


. 136 








Number 2. 






. 137- 


-Margaret Fuller. 


. 180— H. 


D. 


Thoreau. 



181 — R. W. Emerson. 
198 — H. D. Thoreau. 
199 — H, D. Thoreau. 



x8 



2 74 



HppenMy* 



The Poet's Delay . 

Rumours from an ^olian Harp 

Hollis Street Council . 

The Moon .... 

To the Maiden in the East . 

The Summer Rain 

The Artist .... 

English Reformers 

James Pierrepont Greaves . 

Dirge . 

Cromwell 

The Poet 

Lines . 

Saadi . 

The Gallery 

Record of the Months . 

Tennyson's Poems . 

Brownson's Letter to Dr. Chan 
ning .... 

Smyth's Lectures on History 
Editor's Table 

Heraud's Lectures 

French Journals 

Schelling in Berlin . 



200 — H. D. Thoreau. 
200 — H. D. Thoreau. 
201 — Theodore Parker. 
222 — H. D. Thoreau. 
222 — H. D. Thoreau. 
224 — H. D. Thoreau. 
22"^ — C. P. Cranch. 
227 — R. W. Emerson. 
247 — Charles Lane. 
2^(i — W. E. Channing. 
258 — Charles Lane. 
264 — W. E. Channing. 

2(^^ 

265 — R. W. Emerson. 

269 — Samuel G. Ward. 

273 

273 — Margaret Fuller. 



276- 

277 

278 

279 

279 

280 



■R. W. Emerson. 



Volume III. Number 3. 



James Pierrepont Greaves (con- 
tinued) 

Lectures on the Times: The Tran- 
scendentalist .... 

A Song of Spring 

Discoveries in the Nubian Pyra- 
mids (from the German of 
Dr. Carus) 

Anna . 

To Eva at the South 

The Brook . 

The River . 

Life 



281 — Charles Lane. 

297 — R. W. Emerson. 
313 — W. E. Channing. 



314 — Elizabeth Hoar. 
326 — W. E. Channing. 
327 — R. W. Emerson. 
"^2^ — C. S. Tappan. 
329 — W. E. Channing. 
329 — W. E. Channmg. 



HppenbiL 



275 



To .... 

The Laws of Menu 

Death 

The Life and Character of Dr 

Follen .... 
The Prometheus Bound (trans- 
lated) .... 
Literary Intelligence 

{Death of Dr. Channing) . 

(German Topics) 

(German Letter) 

Shelling's Introductory Lecture 
in Berlin (translated) 
Record of the Months . 

Life of Richter . 

An Essay on Transcendentalism 

Letters of Schiller 

Fables of La Fontaine 

Confessions of St. Augustine 

(Notices of Books) . 

Goethe and Swedenborg . 



330 — W. E. Channing. 
331 — W. E. Channing. 
340 — W. E. Channing. 

343 — Theodore Parker. 

363 — H. D. Thoreau. 

387 

387 — R. W. Emerson. 

387 
387 

398— F. H. Hedge. 

404 

404 

406 — Ch. Lane. 

411 

413 
414- 

415 
416 



-R. W. Emerson. 



Volume III. Number 4. 



A. Bronson Alcott's Works . 

Canova . . 

Anacreon (Eleven Poems trans- 
lated) 

What is Beauty } . 

Sayings of Confucius (selected) 

George Keats 

To a Stray Fowl . 

Orphics: I. Smoke. II. Haze 

Sonnets .... 

To .... 

To .... 

The Friends .... 

Europe and European Books 

A Leaf from " A Voyage to Porto 
Rico" 



417 — Charles Lane. 
454 — Margaret Fuller. 

484 — H. D. Thoreau. 
490 — L. M. Child. 
493 — H. D. Thoreau. 
495 — ^J. F. Clarke. 
505 — H. D. Thoreau. 
505 — H. D. Thoreau. 
506 

507 — W. E. Channing. 
507 — W. E. Channing. 
509 — W. E. Channing. 
311 — R. W. Emerson. 

^22 — C. C. Emerson ? 



276 



Hppen&iL 



Dark Ages . . . 
Friendship. From Chaucer's " Ro 
maunt of the Rose " 

Record of the Months . 
Bremer's Neighbours 
Bulwer's Last of the Barons 
Fetes' Music Explained 
Sorrow's Bible in Spain . 
Browning's Paracelsus 
Zschokke's Sleep Walker . 
Heraud's Life of Savonarola 

Literary Intelligence 
(German Letter) 
Catalogue of Books (brought by 
Alcott and Lane from Eng- 
land) 



527 — H. D. Thoreau. 

529 — Selected by 

H. D. Thoreau. 

532 

534 — R. W. Emerson. 
535 — R. W.Emerson. \ 

535 

536 — Charles Lane. 

541 

541 — C. S. Wheeler. 



543— A. B. Alcott. 



Volume IV. Number i 



The Great Lawsuit . . 

The Youth of the Poet and the 

Painter .... 
Ethnical Scriptures. Desatir 

Spring 

Abou Ben Adhem 

The Earth .... 

Social Tendencies 

A Song of Death . 

Notes from the Journal of a Scholar 

Manhood .... 

Gifts 

Past and Present . 

An Old Man 

To Rhea .... 

The Journey 

Notes on Art and Architecture 

The Glade .... 

Voyage to Jamaica 

Record of the Months . 



I — Margaret Fuller. 

48 — W. E. Channing. 

59 

62 

63 — Leigh Hunt. 

64 — W. E. Channing. 

6s — Charles Lane. 

87 — George W. Curtis. 

88 — C. C. Emerson. 

92 — Charles A. Dana. 

93 — R. W. Emerson. 

96 — R. W. Emerson. 
103 — W. E. Channing. 
104 — R. W. Emerson. 
106 — W. E. Channing. 
107 — Samuel G. Ward. 
IIS — W. E. Channing. 
116— B. P. Hunt. 
J 34 



HppenML 



277 



Pierpont's Anti-Slavery Poems 
Garrison's Poems 
CofFm's America 
Channing's Poems . 
Bremer's Holy Family 
Intelligence . 
Fruitlands. 
To Correspondents . 



134 — R. W. Emerson. 
134 — R. W. Emerson. 
134 — R. W. Emerson. 
135 — R. W. Emerson. 
U5 

135— A. B. Alcott. 
136 — R. W. Emerson. 



Volume IV. Number 2. 



Hennell on the Origin of Christ- 
ianity . 

A Day with the Shakers 

The Youth of the Poet and the 
Painter (continued) 

Autumn .... 

Social Tendencies (continued) 

Ethnical Scriptures: Chinese Four 
Books .... 

Via Sacra . . . 

A Winter Walk . 

The Three Dimensions 

Voyage to Jamaica (continued) 

The Mother's Grief 

Sweep Ho! . 

The Sail 

The Comic . 

Ode to Beauty 

AUston's Funeral . 

To the Muse 

William Tell's Song 

A Letter 

New Books . 
The Huguenots 
Longfellow's Spanish Student 

Percival's Poems . 

(Notes of Books) . 



137 — Th. Parker. 
165 — Charles Lane. 

174 — W. E. Channing. 
186 — W. E. Channing. 
188 — Charles Lane. 

205 — H. D. Thoreau. 

210 — Ch. A. Dana. 

21 1— H. D. Thoreau. 

226 — R. W. Emerson.* 

227— B. P. Hunt. 

244 

245 — Ellen Hooper. 

246 — William A. Tappan. 

247 — R. W. Emerson. 

257 — R. W. Emerson. 

259 — W. E. Channing. 

260— W. E. Channing. 

261 — W. E. Channing. 

262 — R. W. Emerson. 

270 

270 

270 — R. W. Emerson ? \ 

,271 — R. W. Emerson. \ 

2'J2 



278 



appenMy* 



Volume IV. Number 3. 



The Youth of the Poet and the 

Painter (continued) 
Translation of Dante . 
Homer, Ossian, Chaucer 

Lines 

The Modern Drama 

To R. B. (Robert Bartlett) . 

Autumn Woods . 

Brook Farm .... 

Tantalus .... 

The Fatal Passion: A Dramatic 

Sketch .... 
Interior or Hidden Life 
Pindar (Note and Translations) 
The Preaching of Buddha (selec- 
tions) .... 

Eros 

Ethnical Scriptures. Hermes Tris 

megistus 
The Times: A Fragment 
Critical Notices 

Child's Letters from New York 

Channing's Present . 

Hopkins's Address . 

Deutsche Schnellpost 



273 — W. E. Channing. 
285 — Samuel G. Ward. 
290 — H. D. Thoreau. 
306 — Ellen Hooper. 
307 — Margaret Fuller. 
349 — Charles A. Dana. 
350 — W. E. Channing. 
351 — Charles Lane. 
357 — R. W. Emerson. 

364 — W. E. Channing. 
373 — Charles Lane. 
379 — H. D. Thoreau. 

391 — H. D. Thoreau. 
401 — R. W. Emerson. 

402 — H. D. Thoreau. 
405 — R. W. Emerson. 



Volume IV. Number 4. 



Immanuel Kant . . . . 
Life in the Woods 
The Emigrants. From Freiligrath 
The Youth of the Poet and the 

Painter (continued) 
The Twin Loves . 
Dialogue 
The Consolers 
To Readers . 
The Death of Shellev 



409 — J. Elliot Cabot. 

415 

425 — Ch. T. Brooks. 

427 — W. E. Channing. 
45s — Samuel G. Ward. 
4S8 — Margaret Fuller. 
469 — Samuel G. Ward. 
470 — W. E. Channing. 
471 — W. E. Channing. 



Hppenbiy^ 



279 



A Song of the Sea 


472- 


-W. E. Channing 


To the Poets .... 


473- 


-W. E. Channing. 


Fourierism 


473- 


-E. P. Peabody. 


The Young American . 


484- 


-R. W. Emerson. 


Herald of Freedom 


307- 


-H. D. Thoreau. 


Fragment of Pindar (translated) . 


513- 


-H. D. Thoreau. 


The Tragic 


315- 


-R. W. Emerson. 


Saturday and Sunday among the 






Creoles 


521 




The Moorish Prince. From Freili- 






grath 


525- 


-C. T. Brooks. 


The Visit 


528- 


-R. W. Emerson. 


Ethnical Scriptures. Chaldean 






Oracles 


529 




Millennial Church 


537- 


-Charles Lane. 


Notice of " Human Nature " 


540 







INDEX. 



Adirondacs, The, poem, 59, 64, 69 

>Esop, 184 

Agassiz, J. L. R., 64 

Alcott, A. B., 104, 105, 112, 113, 119, 

122, 128, 136, 137 
American Scholar, The, essay on, 9 
Anti-Slavery, 99-1 11, 221-224 
Argyll, Duke of, 1 56 
Aristocracy, lecture on, 239 
Arnold, Matthew, 21, 96-98, 168, 182, 

216, 219, 220 
Art of Life, article by F. H. Hedge, 129 

B 

Bacchus, poem, 216 
Bacon, 7 

Bagehot, Walter, 161, 164 
Bentham, Jeremy, 36 
Birrell, Augustine, 22 
Blackwood's Maga^^ine, 166 
Brahma, poem, 67, 219 
Brandes, Dr. George, 192 
Brook Farm, 102-106 
Brown University, 4 
Brownell, W. C, 217 
Burroughs, John, 224 



Cabot, James Elliot, 34, 224, 231 

California, trip to, 228 

Carlyle, Thomas, 22, 52, 57, 76-93, IS7, 

159, 164, 166, 201, 230, 236, 242, 

247 



Celestial Love, poem, 244 

Cervantes, 184 

Chadwick, Dr. J. W., 121 

Channing, Wm. E., 20, 28, }6, 142 

Character, poem, 59 

Charron, 235 

Chaucer, 5, 189 

Cheney, Mrs., 1 1 

Cicero, 18 

Clough, A. H., 157, 158, 160 

Coleridge, S. T., 37, 113 

Commonplace Book, Emerson's, 8, 9, 18 

Conduct of Life, 8, 184, 243 

Conservative, The, essay on, 144 

Cornwall, Barry, 158 

Cruikshank, George, 158 

Culture, essay on, 10 

Curtis, Burrell, 105 

Curtis, George William, 127 



Dcemonic Love, The, poem, 32, 6 1 

Days, poem, 275 

De Quincey, Thomas, 158-166 

Dial, The, 40, 101, 11 2- 154 

Diamond Necklace, The, Carlyle's, 88 

Dickens, Charles, 158 

Divinity School, 27 

Divinity School Address, 43-49, 52 



Edinburgh Review, The, 37 
Education, essay on, 2 
Eliot, George, 124, 125 



281 



282 



Inbey^ 



Emancipation ol the Negroes in the 
British West Indies, address on, 109 

Emerson, Charles, 29, 93, 128 

Emerson, Edward, 29, 153, 201, 226 

Emerson, Mary Moody, 2, 4, 9, 10, 19, 26 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, birth, i ; child- 
hood, 2-4; at college, 4-9; manner 
in youth, 1 1 ; preparation for the min- 
istry, 18-33; on health, 28, 29; re- 
ligion, 34-56; on nature, 57-75; 
relations with Carlyle, 76-91 ; loss of 
his eldest son, 92; loss of his brother 
Charles, 93; as preacher at East Lex- 
ington, 94; on culture, 98; on Anti- 
Slavery, 99-111, 221-224; on Brook 
Farm, 102-106; contributor to The 
Dial, 112-154; editor of The Dial, 
138-154; visit to England, 155-182; 
on Representative Men, 182-201; 
poems, 201-220; as a citizen, 224; 
closing years, 221-233; trip to Cali- 
fornia, 228; house burned, 228; third 
visit to Europe, 229; contribution from 
friends, 229; return to Concord, 230; 
failure of memory, 23 1 ; last illness, 
231 ; his art, 232 

Emerson, Ralph IValdo, Life of, by 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 13 

Emerson, Ralph IValdo, memoir of, by 
James Elliot Cabot, 2, 10 

Emerson, Ruth Haskins (Emerson's 
mother), 2 

Emerson, William, 25, 27 

Emerson, Rev. William, 1 

Emerson's IVorks, Centenary Edition 

of <53 
England, first visit to, 57, 109; second 

visit to, 155-182 
English Traits, 162, 164, 169, 244 
Essays, 85, 87, 101, 118, 235 
Everett, Edward, 20 
Examiner, London, 156 
Experience, essay on, 6 
Experience, poem, 215 



Fiske, John, 69 

Frederick the Great, Carlyle's, 90, 91 



French Revolution, Carlyle's, 82, 83, 

9> 
Froude, J. A., 160 
Fuller, Margaret, 12, 113, 123, 125, 128, 

135-138, 140-142, 146 
Furness, Dr., 4 



Garnett, Dr. Richard, 162, 200-234 
Gifts, essay on, 229 
Gladstone, Wm. E., 230 
Goethe, 7, 1 13, 199, 201 
Grimm, Hermann, 78, 234 



H 



Harvard University, 4 

Hawthorne, Julian, 168 

Helps, Arthur, 158, 164 

Henry yilL, Shakespeare's rhythm of, 

192 
Hero-lVorship, Carlyle's, 241-243 
Heroism, essay on, 98 
Higginson, Thomas W., 122 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 13, 191, 193, 

204, 225 
Howitt, William and Mary, 156 
Hunt, Leigh, 158 



I 



Ideals of Every-Day Life, Dwight's, 

'3'> 
Illinois, 183 
Intellect, poem, 59 



J 



James, Henry, 22, 232 
Jerrold, Douglas, 156 

K 

Keats, George, 146 

Keats, John, 146 

Kirkland, Dr. John Thornton, 8 



Unbei. 



283 



Landor, Walter Savage, 1 70 ; letter 

from, 172-179 
Letter to a Theological Student, George 

Ripley, 130 
Letters and Social Aims, 231 
Literary Ethics, 67 
Longfellow, Henry W., 4 
Lovejoy, Elijah, 99 
Lowell, Charles Russell, 153 
Lowell, James Russell, 4, 35, 64, 95, 135 



M 



Macaulay, T. B., 158 

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 251 

Man, the Reformer, 95, 10 1 

Manchester, Emerson's after-dinner 
speech at, 181 

May-Day, poem, 63, 212, 213, 227 

Merlin, poem, 208, 2 1 1 

Michigan, 183 

Middlemarch, 125 

Middlesex Association of Ministers, 27 

Mind and Manners of the XlXth Cent- 
ury, lectures on, 167 

Miscellanies, Carlyle's, S} 

Monadnoc, poem, 60 

Monadnoc Afar, poem, 74 

Montaigne, 5, 7, 9, 201-203, 235, 241 

Montegut, Emile, 235-247 

Morley, John, 21, 242, 245 

Musketaquid, poem, 62 



N 



Napoleon, 190, 193, 196 

Natural History of the Intellect, lectures 

on, 227, 228 
Natural History of Massachusetts, 

Thoreau's, 1 38 
Nature, 57, 58, 186 
Nature, couplet on, 215 
Nature, essay on, 17, 23, 68 
Notes from the Journal of a Scholar, 

Charles Emerson's, 128 



O 



Ode to Beauty, poem, 209 

Old Age, essay on, 228 

Orphic Sayings, Alcott's, 128, 131, 133 

Oxford, 159 



Paris, 167, 235 

Parker, Theodore, 44, 112, 120, 125 

Past and Present, Carlyle's, 84 

Patmore, Coventry, 158 

Peabody, Elizabeth, 1 1 2 

Phi Beta Kappa speech, 95, 98 

Philadelphia, 183 

Pittsburgh, 183 

Plato, 5, 15, 196, 199 

Plutarch, 5, 7 

Poems, 244 

Potver, essay on, 28 



R 



Religion, 34, 40, 56 

Religion of Beauty , Dwight's, 128 

Representative Men, 156, 183, 201, 240 

Revue des Deux Mondes, 235-250 

Rhodora, The, poem, 216 

Ripley, George, 105, 112, 122 

Robinson, Crabb, 157 

Rodni, 188 

Rogers, Samuel, 158 

Rossetti, Wm., 157 

Royce, Professor, 71 

Roz, M., on Emerson, 244, 246 



Saadi, poem, 142, 207 x? 
Sanborn, F. B., no 
Sartor Resartus, 77, 81, 82 
Saturday Club, the, 22s 
Second Church, the, 93 
S elf-Reliance, essay on, 168 
Seneca, 23s 

Shakespeare, 7, 9, 184, 189, 193, 194, 
235 



284 



llnbCL 



Shaler, Professor, 72 

Silence, poem, 130 

Society and Solitude, 3, 8, 225 

Socrates, 184, 235, 250 

Sphinx, The, poem, 53, 132, 134 

Stafford House, 159 

Stephenson, George, 158 

Stevenson, R. L., 202, 203 

Stillman, W. J., 64, 65 

Stonehenge, 164 

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 200, 241 

Sympathy, poem, by Thoreau, 128 



Tact, poem on, 12 

Talma, 189 

Tennyson, Alfred, 158 

Terminus, poem, 227 

Thackeray, W. M., 155, 157, 166 

Thayer, Professor, 13 

Theophrastus Such, 125 

Thoreau, H. D., 58, 105, 126, 138, 

140 
Thoughts on Modern Literature, 127 
Threnody, poem, 60, 93, 206, 210, 

217, 218 



Times, lecture on the, 106, 138 
Transcendentalist, The, essay on, 145 
Tresor des Humbles, Le, Maeterlinck's, 

251-263 
Tucker, Ellen, 34 
Tyndall, Professor, 73 



U 



Unitarian Church, the, ^6 



Vanity Fair, Thackeray, 157 
Visit, The, poem, 153 

W 

Ware, Henry, 34 
IVealth, essay on, 19 
Wiley & Putnam, firm of, 85 
Winchester, 159, 165 
IVood-Notes, poem, 130 
Woodbury, Professor, 21 
Wordsworth, William, 113, 159, 182, 
216, 219, 220 




BELLES^LE TTRES 



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Tennyson, 



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